George Steiner Quotes

United States, Literary Critic
April 23, 1929 – February, 3, 2020.

Francis George Steiner was a Franco-American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, and educator. He wrote extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, and the impact of the Holocaust. An article in The Guardian described Steiner as a "polyglot and polymath".

Also known as Essayist, Philosopher, Novelist, Educator

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

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

George Steiner

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

George Steiner
- Life
- Words
- Lies
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

George Steiner
Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

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

George Steiner
- Man
- Light
- Genius
Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity.

George Steiner
- Books
- Boredom
- Antidote
Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.

George Steiner

Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.

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

George Steiner
The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.

George Steiner
- Book
- Intellectual
- Pencil
For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.

George Steiner