Frases de George Steiner

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“Ningún lugar es aburrido si me dan una mesa, buen café y unos libros. Eso es una patria.”

“No nos quedan más comienzos.”

“Lo que no se nombra no existe.”

“No hay lenguas pequeñas. no existen sintaxis primitivas. Cada lengua, sabemos, genera y articula una visión del mundo, una narrativa del destino humano, una construcción de futuribles de la cual no hay facsímil en ninguna otra.”

“El error es el punto de partida de la creación.”

“Si no se puede enseñar el amor, ¿se puede enseñar el odio?”

“La crítica literaria suele proceder de déficit de amor.”

“qué someterse a las pruebas de la vida cuando no hay escapatoria a la muerte? La”

“Las narraciones son ensayos para la muerte.”

“Babel es tal vez una bendición misteriosa e inmensa. Las ventanas que abre una lengua dan a un paisaje único. Aprender nuevas lenguas es entrar en otros tantos mundos nuevos.”

“Al mirar hacia atrás, el crítico ve la sombra de un eunuco. ¿Quién sería crítico si pudiera ser escritor?”

“La inhumanidad es perenne.”

“La inmensa mayoría de las biografías humanas son un grisáceo relato que se desarrolla entre espasmos domésticos y el olvido.”

“Schopenhauer asegura que cuando nuestro universo se extinga, la música permanecerá. Para”

“«Existimos para la oscuridad». ¿Esto”

“No se trata solo de que los vehículos convencionales de la civilización —las universidades, las artes, el mundo del libro— fueran incapaces de presentar resistencia apropiada a la brutalidad política; a veces se levantaron para acogerla y tributarle sus ceremonias y su apología. ¿Por qué? ¿Cuáles son los nexos, hasta ahora apenas conocidos, entre las pautas intelectuales, psicológicas, del alto saber literario y las tentaciones de lo inhumano.”

“Los idiolectos del pensamiento, las privacidades de lo no dicho son de un orden mucho más profundo e inalcanzable.”

“To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs — but a tribute nevertheless.”

“Self-projection is, more often than not, the move of the minor craftsman, of the tactics of the hour whose inherent weakness is, precisely, that of originality.”

“Increasingly unable to create for itself a relevant body of myth, the modern imagination will ransack the treasure house of the classic.”

“To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness.”

“If future society assumes the contours foretold by Marxism, if the jungle of our cities turns to the polis of man and the dreams of anger are made real, the representative art will be high comedy. Art will be the laughter of intelligence, as it is in Plato, in Mozart, in Stendhal.”

“There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.”

“The new pornographers subvert this last, vital privacy; they do our imagining for us. They take away the words that were of the night and shout them over the roof-tops, making them hollow.”

“Even where it is manipulated by major talents, deconstruction tends to bear either on marginal texts (Sade, Lautréamont), or on secondary work by a great writer (Barthes on Balzac's Sarrazine). The classics of deconstruction, in Jacques Derrida or Paul De Man, are "misreadings" not of literature but of philosophy; they address themselves to philosophical linguistics and the theory of language. The masks they seek to strip off are those worn by Plato, by Hegel, by Rousseau, by Nietszche or Saussure. Deconstruction has nothing to tell us of Aeschylus or Dante, of Shakespeare or Tolstoy.”

“Anything can be said and, in consequence, written about anything.”

“All serious art, music, literature is a critical act. It is so, firstly, in the sense of Matthew Arnold's phrase: "a criticism of life." Be it realistic, fantastic, Utopian or satiric, the construct of the artist is a counter-statement to the world.”

“What lies beyond man's word is eloquent of God. That is the joyously defeated recognition expressed in the poems of St. John of the Cross and of the mystic tradition.”

“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.”

“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.”