“Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.”

—  George Steiner

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. VI (p. 228).

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure hous…" by George Steiner?
George Steiner photo
George Steiner 74
American writer 1929–2020

Related quotes

Virginia Woolf photo

“I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Source: Virginia Woolf

Aldous Huxley photo

“Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer
Northrop Frye photo

“The "flow of information," which is mostly misinformation, is actually a presentation of myths. And people are increasingly rejecting the prescribed myths & developing their own counter-myths.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: "Quotes", Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), p. 97

Nadine Gordimer photo

“Myth was the mystery plus the fantasy — gods, anthropomorphized animals and birds, chimera, phantasmagorical creatures — that posits out of the imagination some sort of explanation for the mystery. Humans and their fellow creatures were the materiality of the story, but as Nikos Kazantzakis once wrote, 'Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.”

Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South african Nobel-winning writer

Writing and Being (1991)

Leonid Brezhnev photo

“Our aim is to gain control of the two great treasure houses on which the West depends: The energy treasure house of the Persian Gulf and the minerals treasure house of Central and Southern Africa.”

Leonid Brezhnev (1906–1982) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Reported as false in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 9-10. Falsely attributed to Brezhnev as having been said in a secret Warsaw Pact meeting in either 1968 or 1973.
Misattributed

Daniel Bell photo

“Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon.”

Daniel Bell book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Introduction, The Disjunction of Realms, p. 13
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)

Anne Rice photo

“Your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths. Men’s treasures are not yours.”

Anne Rice (1941) American writer

Interview With The Vampire (1976)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo

“Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 109

Mircea Eliade photo

“This myth was created by Freud.”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

No Souvenirs (1977) later retitled Journal II, 1957-1969 (1989), p. 117.
Context: The interpretations of Freud are more and more successful because they are among the myths accessible to modern man. The myth of the murdered father, among others, reconstituted and interpreted in Totem and Taboo. It would be impossible to ferret out a single example of slaying the father in primitive religions or mythologies. This myth was created by Freud. And what is more interesting: the intellectual élite accept it (is it because they understand it? Or because it is "true" for modern man?)

Mohsin Hamid photo

“But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.”

Mohsin Hamid book How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Source: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Related topics