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George Steiner cytaty
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Francis George Steiner – amerykański krytyk literacki, eseista, filozof, nowelista, tłumacz i nauczyciel.

Studiował na uniwersytetach w Paryżu , Chicago, Harvardzie i Oxfordzie. Napisał 15 książek, w tym także powieści, przetłumaczonych na kilkanaście języków . Pisał na temat związków pomiędzy językiem, literaturą i społeczeństwem oraz o Holocauście. Poliglota i polihistor. Często uważa się, że zdefiniował na nowo rolę krytyka. Wikipedia  

✵ 23. Kwiecień 1929 – 3. Luty 2020
George Steiner Fotografia
George Steiner: 74   Cytaty 0   Polubień

George Steiner: Cytaty po angielsku

“Talk can neither be verified nor falsified in any rigorous sense. This is an open secret which hermeneutics and aesthetics, from Aristotle to Croce, have laboured to exorcise or to conceal from themselves and their clients. This ontological, which is to say both primordial and essential axiom (or platitude) of ineradicable undecidability needs, none the less, to be closely argued.”

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George Steiner

Źródło: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 2 (p. 61).

“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.”

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George Steiner

"Humane Literacy".
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?”

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George Steiner

"Humane Literacy" (1963).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.”

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George Steiner

Do Books Matter? (ed. Brian Baumfield), ISBN 0705700143, p. 19
Do Books Matter?

“The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's The Devils no less than the art of Giotto or the Passions of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God.”

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George Steiner

Źródło: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 6 (p. 225).

“Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love. In a manner evident and yet mysterious, the poem or the drama or the novel seizes upon our imaginings. We are not the same when we put down the work as we were when we took it up. To borrow an image from another domain: he who has truly apprehended a painting by Cézanne will thereafter see an apple or a chair as he had not seen them before. Great works of art pass through us like storm-winds, flinging open the doors of perception, pressing upon the architecture of our beliefs with their transforming powers. We seek to record their impact, to put our shaken house in its new order. Through some primary instinct of communion we seek to convey to others the quality and force of our experience. We would persuade them to lay themselves open to it. In this attempt at persuasion originate the truest insights criticism can afford.”

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George Steiner

Źródło: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1960), Ch. 1.

“I am and remain a Marxist. Because otherwise I could not be a proofreader… If California triumphs, there will be no need of proofreaders. Machines will do it better. Or all texts will be audiovisual, with self-correctors built in. Night after night after night, Carlo, I work till my brain aches. So as to get it absolutely right… Getting it right. The holiness of it. The self-respect. Gran Dio, Carlo, you must see what I'm driving at. Utopia simply means getting it right! Communism means taking the errata out of history. Out of man. Reading proofs.”

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George Steiner

Chapter VIII http://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/01/books/books-of-the-times-tales-of-connections-internal-and-external.html
Proofs (1992)

“That is to say that every single book will be magnetized, will be ordered under complicated mathematical clusters, by related subjects, and semantic markers. You will state your questions, or the subject you are interested in, and the computer will find the books for you. Instataneous retrieval brings with it enormous changes in our relation to the history of a subject, because there is a cut-off point in all these systems beond which the previous books are no longer relevant. They have been adequately subsumed in the later ones. You have a completely different way of organsing knowledge—an immensely efficient and in many ways powerfully logical way, but which blocks the essential motion of the hand reaching along a shelf and stumbling on what it did not know was there. When these great knowledge and data-banks, as they are called, are operative there will come a whole change in the way the human mind and eye live with books.”

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George Steiner

Do Books Matter? (ed. Brian Baumfield), ISBN 0705700143, p. 28.
Do Books Matter?

“Tragedy springs from outrage; it protests at the conditions of life. It carries in it the possibilities of disorder, for all tragic poets have something of the rebelliousness of Antigone. Goethe, on the contrary, loathed disorder. He once said that he preferred injustice, signifying by that cruel assertion not his support for reactionary political ideals, but his conviction that injustice is temporary and reparable whereas disorder destroys the very possibilities of human progress. Again, this is an anti-tragic view; in tragedy it is the individual instance of injustice that infirms the general pretence of order. One Hamlet is enough to convict a state of rottenness.”

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George Steiner

Źródło: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. V (p. 167).

“In the United States dramatically, here fortunately much less so, the book store as we have known it is dying. In the United States it is now largely an emporium, featuring music, records, Christmas cards, a large range fo semi-cultural and kitsch products with books fighting for their actual spatial lives. In some of the great university towns such as New Haven, or Princeton, within the past decade, the last good book stores have had to close, and what we have now are text book emporia which are not book stores, but store-houses bracketed according to set reading lists: in other words—where there is none of the genius of waste which a great book store has, where you cannot find what you are not looking for, which is the very essence of a book store.”

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George Steiner

Do Books Matter? (ed. Brian Baumfield), ISBN 0705700143, p. 27.
Do Books Matter?

“For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.”

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George Steiner

Źródło: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 6 (p. 218).

“Those who proclaim and apply to poetic works a "theory of criticism," a "theoretical hermeneutic" are, today, the masters of the academy and the exemplars in the high gossip of arts and letters. Indeed, they have clarioned "the triumph of the theoretical." They are, in truth, either deceiving themselves or purloining from the immense prestige and confidence of science and technology an instrument ontologically inapplicable to their own material. They would enclose water in a sieve.”

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George Steiner

Źródło: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 3 (p. 75).

“The absolute scholar is in fact a rather uncanny being. He is instinct with Nietzsche's finding that to be interested in something, to be totally interested in it, is a libidinal thrust more powerful than love or hatred, more tenacious than faith or friendship — not infrequently, indeed, more compelling than personal life itself. Archimedes does not flee from his killers, he does not even turn his head to acknowledge their rush into his garden when he is immersed in the algebra of conic sections.”

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George Steiner

"The Cleric of Treason".
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

“The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room.”

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George Steiner

"To Civilize our Gentlemen" (1965).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.”

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George Steiner

Źródło: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 3 (p. 9).

“A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.”

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George Steiner

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

“Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.”

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George Steiner

Fields of Force (1974)

“Monotheism at Sinai, primitive Christianity, messianic socialism: these are the three supreme moments in which Western culture is presented with what Ibsen termed "the claims of the ideal." These are the three stages, profoundly interrelated, through which Western consciousness is forced to experience the blackmail of transcendence.”

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George Steiner

"A Season in Hell".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

“Often the children went alone, or held the hands of strangers. Sometimes parents saw them pass and did not dare call out their names. And they went, of course, not for anything they had done or said. But because their parents existed before them. The crime of being one's children.”

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George Steiner

"A Kind of Survivor" (1965).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.”

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George Steiner

Quoted in The Daily Telegraph (London, 1989-05-23).

“What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?”

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George Steiner

Źródło: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 36).

“We are still waging Peloponnesian wars. Our control of the material world and our positive science have grown fantastically. But our very achievements turn against us, making politics more random and wars more bestial.”

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George Steiner

Źródło: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. I (p. 6).

“The ordinary man casts a shadow. In a way we do not quite understand, the man of genius casts light. Instinctively, we flinch from this light. We assure ourselves that genius must pay a terrible price. Often history bears us out: the creator, the supreme artist, the master of politics carries the scars of his greatness.”

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George Steiner

"Not a Preface, but a Word of Thanks," foreword to Unfinished Journey by Yehudi Menuhin (1977).

“To a degree which is difficult to determine, the esoteric impulse in twentieth-century music, literature and the arts reflects calculation. It looks to the flattery of academic and hermeneutic notice. Reciprocally, the academy turns towards that which appears to require its exegetic, cryptographic skills.”

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George Steiner

Źródło: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 38).

“For let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance.”

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George Steiner

"The Hollow Miracle".
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“As the glossaries lengthen, as the footnotes become more elementary and didactic, the poem, the epic, the drama, move out of balance on the actual page. As even the more rudimentary of mythological, religious or historical references, which form the grammar of Western literature, have to be elucidated, the lines of Spenser, of Pope, of Shelley or of Sweeney Among the Nightingales, blur away from immediacy. Where it is necessary to annotate every proper name and classical allusion in the dialogue between Jessica and Lorenzo in the garden at Belmont, or in Iachimo's stealthy rhetoric when he emerges in Imogen's bedchamber, these marvellous spontaneities of enacted feeling become "literary" and twice-removed.”

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George Steiner

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

“The age of the book is almost gone.”

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George Steiner

Quoted in The Daily Mail (London, 1988-06-27).

“Where God clings to our culture, to our routines of discourse, He is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded in the childhood of rational speech. So Nietzsche”

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George Steiner

and many after him
Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City

“Though acts of reception and of understanding are in some measure fictions of ordered intuition, myths of reason, this truth does not justify the denial of intentional conduct. It is as absurd to discard as mendacious, as anarchically opaque, the bearing of contextual probability and suggestion, as it is to invest in such probability any blind trust. The negations of post-structuralism and of certain varieties of deconstruction are precisely as dogmatic, as political as were the positivist equations of archival historicism. The "emptiness of meaning" postulate is no less a priori, no less a case of despotic reductionism than were, say, the axioms of economic and psycho-sociological causality in regard to the generation of meaning in literature and the arts in turn-of-the-century pragmatism and scientism.”

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George Steiner

Źródło: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 3 (pp. 174-175).

“Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life.”

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George Steiner

"K" (1963), introduction to The Trial by Franz Kafka
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)