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1 " when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. "
― George Steiner
2 " 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. "
― George Steiner , Errata: An Examined Life
3 " What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough "
4 " 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). "
― George Steiner , Real Presences
5 " 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. "
6 " When a language dies, a possible world dies with it. "
7 " 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 & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman
8 " There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world. "
9 " 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. "
― George Steiner , Lessons of the Masters
10 " 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. "
11 " 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. "
12 " The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral. "
― George Steiner , Grammars of Creation
13 " Because Greek myths encode certain primary biological and social confrontations and self-perceptions in the history of man, they endure as an animate legacy in collective remembrance and recognition.We come home to them as to our psychic roots. "
― George Steiner , Antigones
14 " Es un secreto a voces que los intelectuales de biblioteca y los hombres que se pasan la vida rodeados de palabras, de textos, pueden experimentar con especial intensidad las seducciones de las propuestas políticas violentas, particularmente cuando tal violencia no toca a su propia persona. En la sensibilidad y la visión del maestro carismático, del absolutista de lafilosofía, puede haber más que un simple toque de sadismo vicario (La lección, de Ionesco, es una macabra parábola de esto). "
― George Steiner , Martin Heidegger
15 " We are, in the main, 'word-blind' to Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent verse. This blindness results from a major change in habits of sensibility. Our contemporary sense of the poetic, our often unexamined presumptions about valid or spurious uses of figurative speech have developed from a conscious negation of fin de siécle ideals. "
― George Steiner , After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
16 " ...there is in men and women a motivation stronger even than love or hatred or fear. It is that of being interested — in a body of knowledge, in a problem, in a hobby, in tomorrow’s newspaper. "
― George Steiner , At the New Yorker
17 " Mentre [il lettore] legge, la sua esistenza si accorcia. La sua lettura è un anello nella catena di continuità nella rappresentazione del testo che sottoscrive la sopravvivenza del testo letto. "
― George Steiner , No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1995
18 " Leggiamo il libro ma, più profondamente, è il libro a leggere noi. "
― George Steiner , I libri hanno bisogno di noi
19 " No cabe duda de que el contraataque más exuberante lanzado por escritor alguno contra la reducción del lenguaje es el de James Joyce. Después de Shakespeare y de Burton, la literatura no había conocido semejante goloso de las palabras. Como si se hubiera dado cuenta de que la ciecnia había arrebatado al lenguaje muchas de sus antiguas posesiones, de sus colonias periféricas, Joyce quiso anexionarle una nuevo reino subterráneo. El Ulises pesca en su red luminosa la confusión viva de la vida inconsciente; Finnegan´s Wake destruye los bastiones del sueño, Joyce, como nadie había después de Milton, devuelve al oído inglés la vasta magnificiencia de su ancestro. Comanda grandes batallones de palabras, recluta nuevas palabras hace tiempo olvidadas u oxidadas, llama a filas otras palabras nuevas convocadas por las necesidades de la imaginación. "
20 " Literature has chosen the domain of small scale personal relationships, and no longer deals with great metaphysical themes. We no longer have writers like Balzac and Zola, geniuses of human comedy who could explore every domain. Proust also created an inexhaustible world, and Joyce’s Ulysses is still very close to Homer . . . Joyce is the bridge between the two great worlds of classicism and chaos. In the past, philosophy could also claim to be universal. The entire world was open to the thought of a philosopher like Spinoza. Today an immense part of the universe is closed to us. "
