George Steiner Quotes

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

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.

Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.

I'm sorry, I'm absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs.

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

Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.

He who has read Kafka's Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.

Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.

I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest.

When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.

What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough

We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.