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

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

To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate.

- George Steiner

When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

- 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…

- 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

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

Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.

- 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…

- George Steiner