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Quotes from The Death of Tragedy — George Steiner

1929–2020 United States

← All quotes by George Steiner

7 quotes

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

The Death of Tragedy (1961)

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

The Death of Tragedy (1961)

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

The Death of Tragedy (1961)

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

The Death of Tragedy (1961)

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

The Death of Tragedy (1961)

Tragedy speaks not of secular dilemmas which may be resolved by rational innovation, but of the unalterable bias toward inhumanity and destruction in the drift of the world.

The Death of Tragedy (1961)

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.

The Death of Tragedy (1961)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: George Steiner (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.