The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: 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.

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

Early, Learned, Rabbi

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.

Age, I Am, Speak

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

fame, celebrities

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

language, silence

When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.

culture, language

No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.

language, symbol

The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged ‘condensations’ around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).

consciousness, language

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.

criticism, kafka, laws, love

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 a love for that which one loves; to make of one’s inward present their future; that is a threefold adventure like no other.

inspirational, teaching

What you don’t know by heart you haven’t really loved deeply enough

Books – the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity