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Home
Authors
George Steiner
American
Critic
About the author
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,
American
Critic
#Heart
#Being
#Prose
#Expression
#Tribute
The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.
George Steiner,
American
Critic
#Vision
The age of the book is almost gone.
George Steiner,
American
Critic
#Age
The ordinary man casts a shadow in a way we do not quite understand. The man of genius casts light.
George Steiner,
American
Critic
#Man
#Light
#Genius
#Shadow
There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
George Steiner,
American
Critic
#Culture
#Wrong
To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
George Steiner,
American
Critic
#War
#Peace
#Men
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,
American
Critic
#Work
#Day
#Play
#Man
#Evening
Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.
George Steiner,
American
Critic
#Life
#Words
#Lies
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,
American
Critic
#Language
#Rest
#Reality
#Silence
The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner,
American
Critic
#Majority
Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.
George Steiner,
American
Critic
#Men