Famous quotes by »

George Steiner

Francis George Steiner (born April 23, 1929), is an influential European-born American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, translator, and educator

Update this biography »
Complete biography of George Steiner »

0 fans

Sort by:PopularityA - Z

A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.

– George Steiner

Rate it:

Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and archive mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement, against that past.

– George Steiner

Rate it:

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.

– George Steiner

Rate it:

It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.

– George Steiner

Rate it:

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

– George Steiner

Rate it:

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.

– George Steiner

Rate it:

The age of the book is almost gone.

– George Steiner

Rate it:

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

– George Steiner

Rate it:

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration but the honing is uniform.

– George Steiner

Rate it:

The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

– George Steiner

Rate it:

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

– George Steiner

Rate it:

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

– George Steiner

Rate it:

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

– George Steiner

Rate it:

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

– George Steiner

Rate it:

Share your thoughts on George Steiner's quotes with the community:

0 Comments

Notify me of new comments via email.

Quote of the Day Today's Quote | Archive

Would you like us to send you a FREE inspiring quote delivered to your inbox daily?

Citation

Use the citation below to add this author page to your bibliography:

Style:MLAChicagoAPA

"George Steiner Quotes." Quotes.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2025. Web. 23 Jan. 2025. <https://www.quotes.net/authors/George+Steiner+Quotes>.

Missing a quote of George Steiner?

Know another good quote of George Steiner? Don't keep it to yourself!

The Web's Largest Resource for

Famous Quotes & Sayings

A Member Of The STANDS4 Network

Our favorite collection of

Famous Authors

Golda Meir
1898 - 1978
Galileo Galilei
1564 - 1642
Benjamin Franklin
1706 - 1790
Confucius
551 BC - 479 BC
Ernest Hemingway
1899 - 1961
Emily Dickinson
1830 - 1886
Albert Einstein
1879 - 1955

Browse Quotes.net

#A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Random New Quotes

Quiz

Are you a quotes master?

"Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing, unless it means effort, pain, difficulty."

A Marilyn Monroe

B Theodore Roosevelt

C Winston Churchill

D David Beckham