George Steiner Zitate (75 Zitate) | Zitate berühmter Personen

Preface.
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)
Kontext: 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?

“In aesthetic discourse, no interpretative-critical analysis, doctrine or programme is superseded, is erased, by any later construction. The Copernican theory did correct and supersede that of Ptolemy. The chemistry of Lavoisier makes untenable the early phlogiston theory. Aristotle on mimesis and pathos is not superseded by Lessing or Bergson. The Surrealist manifestos of Breton do not cancel out Pope's Essay on Criticism though they may well be antithetical to it.”

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George Steiner

Quelle: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 3 (p. 76).

“The private ownership of great art, its seclusion from the general view of men and women, let alone from that of interested amateurs and scholars, is a curious business. The literal disappearance of a Turner or a Van Gogh into some Middle Eastern or Latin-American bank vault to be kept as investment and collateral, the sardonic decision of a Greek shipping tycoon to put an incomparable El Greco on his yacht, where it hangs at persistent risk — these are phenomena that verge on vandalism.”

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George Steiner

"The Cleric of Treason".
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

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

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George Steiner

Quelle: Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City, Ch. 6 (p. 27).

“Do the identifications with fictions, the inner, tidal motions of pathos and libido which the novel, the film, the painting, the symphony unleash within us somehow immunize us against the humbler, less formed, but actual claims of suffering and of need in our surroundings? Does the cry in the tragic play muffle, even blot out, the cry in the street?”

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George Steiner

Quelle: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 1 (p. 144).

“When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation — albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware — of its own best hopes.”

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George Steiner

"A Season in Hell".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

“Creation of absolutely the first rank — in philosophy, in music, in much of literature, in mathematics — continues to occur outside the American milieu. It is at once taken up and intelligently exploited, but the "motion of the spirit" has taken place elsewhere, amid the enervation of Europe, in the oppressive climate of Russia. There is, in a good deal of American intellectual, artistic production (recent paining may be a challenging exception) a characteristic near-greatness, a strength just below the best. Could it be that the United States is destined to be the "museum culture?"”

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George Steiner

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

“Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.”

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George Steiner

Quelle: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. III (p. 104).

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

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George Steiner

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

“In the Soviet Union, he knew, great art hangs in public galleries. No scholars, no men and women waiting to mend their souls before a Raphael or a Matisse need wait, cap in hand at the mansion door.”

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George Steiner

"The Cleric of Treason".
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

“It was a brilliant, mutinous period. Brecht gave back to German prose its Lutheran simplicity and Thomas Mann brought into his style the supple, luminous elegance of the classic and Mediterranean tradition. These years, 1920-33, were the anni mirabiles of the modern German spirit.”

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George Steiner

"The Hollow Miracle" (1959).
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“Almost alone among cognitive-aesthetic movements and strategies of interpretation, deconstruction neither champions any body of past literature or art, nor does it act as vanguard or advocate for any contemporary or incipient school. The New Criticism and T. S. Eliot strove for the revaluation of Metaphysical poetry so as to underwrite, in turn, certain tactics of modenity. Aristotle was advocate for Sophocles. Deconstruction is, intentionally, marginal (a key trope) to all histories of taste and manifestos for innovation.”

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George Steiner

Quelle: Real Presences (1989), II: The Broken Contract, Ch. 7 (p. 117).

“What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose "nerve and blood" are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if.”

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George Steiner

Quelle: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 7 (p. 229).

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

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George Steiner

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

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

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George Steiner

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

“Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien — the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive — tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me.”

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George Steiner

Quelle: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 4 (p. 183).

“Verse no longer stands at the centre of communicative discourse. It is no longer, as it was from Homer to Milton, the natural repository of knowledge and traditional sentiment. It no longer gives to society its main record of past grandeur or its natural setting for prophecy, as it did in Virgil and Dante. Verse has grown private. It is a special language which the individual poet insinuates, by force of personal genius, into the awareness of his contemporaries, persuading to learn and perhaps hand on his own uses of words. Poetry has become essentially lyric — that is to say, it is the poetry of private vision rather than of public or of national occasion.”

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George Steiner

Quelle: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. IX (p. 309).

“When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.”

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George Steiner

Quelle: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. IX: (p. 314).

“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.”

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George Steiner

"Tomorrow"
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

“Fantasizing about action out there in the 'real' world, spinning dreams abut the secret centrality, about the occult importance of the labours in which he has interred his existence — labours that the vast majority of his fellow men would deem wholly marginal and socially wasteful if they knew of them at all — the pure scholar, the master of catalogues, can sup on hatred. At the ordinary level, he will exorcize his spleen in the ad-hominem nastiness of a book review, in the arsenic of a footnote. He will vent his resentments in the soft betrayals of an ambiguous recommendation or examination report and in the scorpion's round of a committee on tenure. The violence stays formal. Not, one supposes, in Professor Blunt.”

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George Steiner

"The Cleric of Treason"
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

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

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George Steiner

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

“For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport that which is "grave and constant" (Joyce's epithets) in the mystery of our condition.”

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George Steiner

Quelle: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 6 (p. 224).

“Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.”

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George Steiner

"A Kind of Survivor".
Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

“But I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false attribution of a Watteau drawing or an inaccurate transcription of a fourteenth-century epigraph is a sin against the spirit and in the afternoon or evening transmits to the agents of Soviet intelligence classified, perhaps vital information given to him in sworn trust by his countrymen and intimate colleagues. What are the sources of such scission? How does the spirit mask itself?”

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George Steiner

"The Cleric of Treason," The New Yorker (1980-12-08).
George Steiner: A Reader (1984)

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