Quotes from George Steiner

For the late-twentieth-century reader, says Borges, Joyce comes before Homer, and the Odyssey is a late commentary on Ulysses .

We are the 'other ones' whom the living significations of the aesthetic seek out.

Because Greek myths encode certain primary biological and social confrontations and self-perceptions in the history of man, they endure as an animate legacy in collective remembrance and recognition. We come home to them as to our psychic roots.

I believe the matter of music to be central to that of the meanings of man, of man's access to or abstention from metaphysical experience. Our capacities to compose and to respond to musical form and sense directly implicate the mystery of the human condition. To ask 'what is music?' may well be one way of asking 'what is man?

Tot ceea ce putem spune despre limb?, ca ÅŸi despre moarte este, într- un anumit sens, un adev?r inaccesibil.

La mayoría de los matrimonios, la mayoría de las relaciones amorosas, logra perdurar gracias a un rosario de reconciliaciones, no siempre veraces.

Algunos chamanes consideran el estrabismo como signo de que se posee un don profético.

Los creadores, los descubridores científicos, quienes reinan en la política y en la guerra, forjan nuestro mundo. No son como nosotros. De ahí nuestra furibunda esperanza de olfatear algún defecto en su magnitud; de reducirlos a nuestro propio, insignificante tamaño.

La palabrería de lo «políticamente correcto» ha hecho casi imposible entablar un debate serio acerca de la naturaleza y la educación; examinar la parte de la herencia genética, y de factores económicos y sociales, en la composición de las capacidades humanas.

El hambre, el velo, el gueto ortodoxo, las asfixias que pregona el fundamentalismo patriarcal pueden frenar el despliegue del ser humano

They will learn by heart, perceiving the elemental pulse of love implicit in that idiom; knowing that the 'amateur' is the lover (amatore) of that which he knows and performs.

Una mayoría incalculable de la humanidad elegirá ver telenovelas en vez de leer a Esquilo;

Schopenhauer asegura que cuando nuestro universo se extinga, la música permanecerá. Para

No hay lenguas pequeñas. no existen sintaxis primitivas. Cada lengua, sabemos, genera y articula una visión del mundo, una narrativa del destino humano, una construcción de futuribles de la cual no hay facsímil en ninguna otra. —

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code.

I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward.

The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.