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„when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.“

—  George Steiner

„Nothing in the next-door world of Dachau impinged on the great winter cycle of Beethoven chamber music played in Munich. No canvases came off museum walls as the butchers strolled reverently past, guide-books in hand.“

—  George Steiner

"In a Post-Culture".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

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

—  George Steiner

„We know now 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

Preface.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
Контексте: We come after. We know now 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. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?

„For let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism found in the language precisely what it needed to give voice to its savagery. Hitler heard inside his native tongue the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance.“

—  George Steiner

"The Hollow Miracle".
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

„We are still waging Peloponnesian wars. Our control of the material world and our positive science have grown fantastically. But our very achievements turn against us, making politics more random and wars more bestial.“

—  George Steiner

Источник: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. I (p. 6).

„It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past.“

—  George Steiner

"The Great Ennui".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

„Those who proclaim and apply to poetic works a "theory of criticism," a "theoretical hermeneutic" are, today, the masters of the academy and the exemplars in the high gossip of arts and letters. Indeed, they have clarioned "the triumph of the theoretical." They are, in truth, either deceiving themselves or purloining from the immense prestige and confidence of science and technology an instrument ontologically inapplicable to their own material. They would enclose water in a sieve.“

—  George Steiner

Источник: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 3 (p. 75).

„The Socratic demonstration of the ultimate unity of tragic and comic drama is forever lost. But the proof is in the art of Chekhov.“

—  George Steiner

Источник: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. VIII (p. 302).

„The really deep divergence between the humanistic and scientific sensibilities is one of temporality. Very nearly by definition, the scientist knows that tomorrow will be in advance of today. A twentieth-century schoolboy can manipulate mathematical and experimental concepts inaccessible to a Galileo or a Gauss. For a scientist the curve of the future is positive. Inevitably, the humanist looks back.“

—  George Steiner

"Tomorrow".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

„We cannot turn back. We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle, even if it leads, perhaps because it leads, on to realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control. And we shall do so with that desolate clairvoyance, so marvellously rendered in Bartok's music, because opening doors is the tragic merit of our identity.“

—  George Steiner

"Tomorrow"
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

„The absolute scholar is in fact a rather uncanny being. He is instinct with Nietzsche's finding that to be interested in something, to be totally interested in it, is a libidinal thrust more powerful than love or hatred, more tenacious than faith or friendship — not infrequently, indeed, more compelling than personal life itself. Archimedes does not flee from his killers, he does not even turn his head to acknowledge their rush into his garden when he is immersed in the algebra of conic sections.“

—  George Steiner

"The Cleric of Treason".

„The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room.“

—  George Steiner

"To Civilize our Gentlemen" (1965).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

„The private reader of listener can become an executant of felt meaning when he learns the poem or the musical passage by heart. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force.“

—  George Steiner

Источник: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 3 (p. 9).

„The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.“

—  George Steiner

"Humane Literacy".
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

„A sentence always means more. Even a single word, within the weave of incommensurable connotation, can, and usually does.“

—  George Steiner

Источник: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 4 (p. 82).

„We speak still of "sunrise" and "sunset." We do so as if the Copernican model of the solar system had not replaced, ineradicably, the Ptolemaic. Vacant metaphors, eroded figures of speech, inhabit our vocabulary and grammar. They are caught, tenaciously, in the scaffolding and recesses of our common parlance. There they rattle about like old rags or ghosts in the attic.“

—  George Steiner

Источник: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 1 (p. 3).

„Literary criticism has about it neither rigour nor proof. Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade.“

—  George Steiner

Источник: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. X (p. 351).

„Though acts of reception and of understanding are in some measure fictions of ordered intuition, myths of reason, this truth does not justify the denial of intentional conduct. It is as absurd to discard as mendacious, as anarchically opaque, the bearing of contextual probability and suggestion, as it is to invest in such probability any blind trust. The negations of post-structuralism and of certain varieties of deconstruction are precisely as dogmatic, as political as were the positivist equations of archival historicism. The "emptiness of meaning" postulate is no less a priori, no less a case of despotic reductionism than were, say, the axioms of economic and psycho-sociological causality in regard to the generation of meaning in literature and the arts in turn-of-the-century pragmatism and scientism.“

—  George Steiner

Источник: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 3 (pp. 174-175).