Quotes from George Steiner

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.

My father loved poetry and music. But deep in himself he thought teaching the finest thing a person could do.

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right.

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

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

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

If there is a chronic infirmity by which every teacher ought to be afflicted, it is, indeed, hope.

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

The age of the book is almost gone.

Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics, will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an age when this is not done anymore, when responsible knowledge is specialized knowledge.

I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger.

It took 10 months for me to learn to tie a lace; I must have howled with rage and frustration. But one day I could tie my laces. That no one can take from you. I profoundly distrust the pedagogy of ease.

To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding

Life proceeds amid an incessant network of signals.

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.

Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

The dramatic arises out of the margin of opaqueness between a writer and his personages, out of the potential for the unexpected. In the full dramatic character lurks the unforeseen possibility, the gift of disorder.

We are, in the main, 'word-blind' to Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent verse. This blindness results from a major change in habits of sensibility. Our contemporary sense of the poetic, our often unexamined presumptions about valid or spurious uses of figurative speech have developed from a conscious negation of fin de siécle ideals.

Too often, to speak is to "get it wrong.

Todo el mundo sabe lo que es un flechazo, el amor a primera vista; no hay forma de explicarlo. Sucede, no cabe duda de que sucede: una mirada, un gesto, en los que se decide toda una vida.