Quotes by George Steiner

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger.

“We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.”