Language can only deal meaningfully with... by George Steiner | We Heart Quotes

philosopher Rest Culture essayist Language

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

Other quotes by George Steiner

Words Life

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

- George Steiner

Majority

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

- George Steiner

Vision

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

- George Steiner

Genius Man

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

- George Steiner

Work Man

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

Age

The age of the book is almost gone.

- George Steiner

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The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man's self.

- Francis Bacon

While one man can discover a certain thing by himself, another is never able to understand it, even if taught by means of all possible expressions and metaphors, and during a long period; his mind can in no way grasp it, his capacity is insufficient for it.

- Maimonides