“Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.”
"The Retreat from the Word," Kenyon Review (Spring 1961).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
George Steiner74
American writer 1929–2020Related quotes
“You can deal with reality sooner, or later the reality will deal with you.”
John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor
Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn
“Silence is the only language god speaks.”
Charles Simic (1938) American poet
Source: Dime-Store Alchemy
Alex Haley (1921–1992) African American biographer, screenwriter, and novelist
As quoted in My Soul Looks Back, 'Less I Forget : A Collection of Quotations (1993) by Dorothy Winbush Riley.
Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian
Professor A. L. Basham in: Daya Kishan Thussu Communicating India's Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood https://books.google.co.in/books?id=Ab_QAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA47, Palgrave Macmillan, 24 October 2013, p. 47.
Arthur Llewellyn Basham (1914–1986) British historian and Indologist
Professor A. L. Basham in: Daya Kishan Thussu Communicating India's Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood https://books.google.co.in/books?id=Ab_QAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA47, Palgrave Macmillan, 24 October 2013, p. 47.
G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer
In Search of the Miraculous (1949)
Context: A man can keep silence in such a ways that no one will even notice it. The whole point is that we say a good deal too much. If we limited ourselves to what is actually necessary, this alone would be keeping the silence. And it is the same with everything else, with food, with pleasures, with sleep; with everything there is a limit to what is necessary. After this "sin" begins. This is something that must be grasped, a "sin" is something which is not necessary.
