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.
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
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
the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others … - George Steiner
the calling of the teacher. There is no craft more privileged. To awaken in another human being powers, dreams beyond one’s own; to induce in others …
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement. - George Steiner
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. - George Steiner
When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation - albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware - of it… - George Steiner
When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation - albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware - of it…
Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in… - George Steiner
Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in…
To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate. - George Steiner
To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.
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
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Bor… - George Steiner
He is no true reader who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Bor…
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