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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 Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

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Intelligence

More quotes by George Steiner

Compared to Homeric or even to medieval times, modern man inhabits the physical world like a rapacious stranger.

Marxism and the Literary Critic (1967)

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

The Death of Tragedy (1961)

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

Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 (1967)

For many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.

Real Presences (1989)

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

Real Presences (1989)

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Each of these private teachers who work for pay ... inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.

Socrates

Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.

Wilhelm Reich Philosophy : An Introduction to the Art of Wondering (2005)

Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël De l’Allemagne [Germany (1813)

Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite.

Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: George Steiner (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.