Top 80 George Steiner Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “I’m sorry, I’m absolutely convinced that there is at the moment no realistic prospect for very much hope in human affairs.”

— George Steiner

53. “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.”

— George Steiner

54. “The age of the book is almost gone.”

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

57. “Bookishness, highest literacy, every technique of cultural propaganda and training not only can accompany bestiality and oppression and despotism but at certain points foster it.”

— George Steiner

58. “What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?”

— George Steiner

59. “Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.”

— George Steiner

60. “When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation – albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware – of its own best hopes.”

— George Steiner

61. “I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.”

— George Steiner

62. “More and more lower-middle-income families either live their lives in debt or leave the city altogether. The boom is strictly at the penthouse level.”

— George Steiner

63. “After Babel postulates that translation is formally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal exchanges. To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.”

— George Steiner

64. “Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.”

— George Steiner

65. “Ours is the ability, the need, to gainsay or ‘un-say’ the world, to image and speak it otherwise. In that capacity in its biological and social evolution, may lie some of the clues to the question of the origins of human speech and the multiplicity of tongues. It is not, perhaps, ‘a theory of information’ that will serve us best in trying to clarify the nature of language, but a ‘theory of misinformation’.”

— George Steiner

66. “The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.”

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

68. “Indeed, what could God be if His being could be circumscribed, let alone demonstrated by human dialectics and ratiocination?”

— George Steiner

69. “Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.”

— George Steiner

70. “The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.”

— George Steiner

71. “Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely.”

— George Steiner

72. “But there is a third mode of trancendence: in it language simply ceases, and the motion of spirit gives no further outward manifestation of its being. The poet enters into silence. Here the word borders not on radiance or music, but on night.”

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

75. “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.”

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

77. “When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.”

— George Steiner

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

— George Steiner

79. “Too often, to speak is to “get it wrong.”

— George Steiner

80. “There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world.”

— George Steiner

81. “Those who, in actual fact, generate the syllabus, who recognize, elucidate, and transmit the legacy of literacy in regard to textual, artistic, and musical creation, have always been, are a handful.”

— George Steiner

82. “It is not the literal past that rules us: it is images of the past.”

— George Steiner

83. “Unlike Tolstoy, Dostoevsky was ardently persuaded of Christ’s divinity, but that divinity moved his soul and solicited his intelligence most forcefully through its human aspect.”

— George Steiner