“What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose "nerve and blood" are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if.”
Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 7 (p. 229).
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
George Steiner 74
American writer 1929–2020Related quotes
“But Ajax now no longer thought it good
To keep his post, and stand where others stood.”
Book XV
Homer His Iliads Translated (1660)
from the 1969 book Empire and Revolution.
1960s
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a "rational" being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions.
"Richard Fentnor Harroby" in Ch. 1 : Pallation of the Gambit
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Source: Philosophy At The Limit (1990), Chapter 4, Philosophy As Writing: The Case Of Hegel, p. 74
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 83.