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

Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.
George Steiner

The age of the book is almost gone.
George Steiner

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion.
George Steiner

The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration; but the honing is uniform.
George Steiner

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.
George Steiner

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

There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.
George Steiner

To many men... the miasma of peace seems more suffocating than the bracing air of war.
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


Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity, do not easily resume life.
George Steiner