Quotes from George Steiner

Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence.

Ningún lugar es aburrido si me dan una mesa, buen café y unos libros. Eso es una patria.

The Fall was the consequence and punishment of man's free will that for the first time had asserted itself against the universal God and rejoiced in a consciousness and pleasure entirely its own - tragically its own; for man had to forsake the indwelling in the supreme Intelligence and thus the harmony between himself and Being as such...

La gran maestra de la democracia es la muerte. Todo

qué someterse a las pruebas de la vida cuando no hay escapatoria a la muerte? La

Existimos para la oscuridad». ¿Esto

The news brought by annunciations not only stays new; it can be unendurable in its ambiguity.

Only language knows no conceptual, no projective finality.

any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, . . . any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is . . . underwritten by the assumption of God's presence.

Las narraciones son ensayos para la muerte.

Of these recognitions and needs, of their constantly recursive formulation and fulfillment, comes the canon. From the talismanic quickening of being which is ours when we experience, when we live the major text, the master-painting or sculpture, the necessary music, the syllabus is made.

The poet of the Pervigilium Veneris wrote in a darkening time, amid the breakdown of classic literacy. He knew that the Muses can fall silent: perdidi musam tacendo, nec me Apollo respicit: sic Amyclas, cum tacerent, perdidit silentium. "To perish by silence": that civilization on which Apollo looks no more will not long endure.

Wheere they do not press factitious claims to theory and the theoretical and work clearly within their own secondary, subjective and intuitive nature — all three qualifiers being of the utmost bearing — explicative and evaluative 'meta-texts' are both necessary and fruitful.

Si no se puede enseñar el amor, ¿se puede enseñar el odio?

We may also conceive of certain explicative techniques as dramatized myths or mythologies of intelligibility, as fables of understanding. . . Narratives and myths are poetic genres. They are not theories.

No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation (onomatopoeia), has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.

Tennyson shall have his day, and Donne his eclipse.

Los idiolectos del pensamiento, las privacidades de lo no dicho son de un orden mucho más profundo e inalcanzable.

El orgasmo concorde (probablemente raro) es lo más cercano que hay en la experiencia humana a la abolición del yo

Confucian rigour swept away the 'magical nonsense 'and Taoist liturgies of alchemical arts. None the less ,' if we now have powder metallurgy , beryllium alloys and liquid oxygen steel', this is owning to the Wizards ,not to the censorious apostles of common sense.

Aucun homme, aucune femme ne doit justifier son anthologie personnelle, ses choix canoniques. L'amour ne se justifie pas par l'argumentation.

If there is in deconstruction any hint towards valuation, towards the choice of one text for commentary rather than another, it lies merely in the wealth, gamesomeness and ingenuity of the misreadings or emancipations which it occasions.

La amistad puede definirse como el acto gratuito, pero profundamente significativo, de quienes están «en libertad».

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.