Top 80 George Steiner Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— George Steiner

2. “The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.”

— George Steiner

3. “To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.”

— George Steiner

4. “Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.”

— George Steiner

5. “Chess may be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. As for a chess genius, he is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.”

— George Steiner

6. “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.”

— George Steiner

7. “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

8. “The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words.”

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

10. “The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral.”

— George Steiner

11. “The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky’s The Devils no less than the art of Giotto or the Passions of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God.”

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

13. “Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand.”

— George Steiner

14. “The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.”

— George Steiner

15. “Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.”

— George Steiner

16. “There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.”

— George Steiner

17. “To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs – but a tribute nevertheless.”

— George Steiner

18. “Books – the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.”

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

20. “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.”

— George Steiner

21. “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.”

— George Steiner

22. “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.”

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

24. “Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality.”

— George Steiner

25. “All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold’s phrase: “a criticism of life.” Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.”

— George Steiner

26. “When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch’s shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?”

— George Steiner

27. “We are still waging Peloponnesian wars. Our control of the material world and our positive science have grown fantastically. But our very achievements turn against us, making politics more random and wars more bestial.”

— George Steiner

28. “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.”

— George Steiner

29. “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.”

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

32. “The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.”

— George Steiner

33. “To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.”

— George Steiner

34. “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.”

— George Steiner

35. “Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.”

— George Steiner

36. “What you don’t know by heart you haven’t really loved deeply enough.”

— George Steiner

37. “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

38. “A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.”

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

40. “Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.”

— George Steiner

41. “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.”

— George Steiner

42. “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.”

— George Steiner

43. “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.”

— George Steiner

44. “Fischer does not merely outplay opponents; he leaves them bodily and mentally glutted. Fisher himself speaks of the exultant instant in which he feels the ‘ego of the other player crumbling.’”

— George Steiner

45. “If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of anger are made real, the representative art will be high comedy. Art will be the laughter of intelligence, as it is in Plato, in Mozart, in Stendhal.”

— George Steiner

46. “Given my age, I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do.”

— George Steiner

47. “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.”

— George Steiner

48. “Life proceeds amid an incessant network of signals.”

— George Steiner

49. “To be a European is to try to negotiate morally, intellectually and existentially the opposing statements and praxis of the city of Socrates and the city of Isaiah.”

— George Steiner

50. “Pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.”

— George Steiner