George Steiner Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

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

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

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

“The age of the book is almost gone.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I learned early on that 'rabbi' means teacher, not priest.”

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