George Steiner Quotes

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

Every one loves his country, his manners, his language, his wife, his children; not because they are the best in the World, but because they are absolutely his own, and he loves himself and his own labors in them.

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

This re-appearance of the doctrine of freewill serves to support that of the pretension of the natural man to be not irremediably fallen, for this is what such doctrine tends to. All who have never been deeply convicted of sin, all persons in whom this conviction is based on gross external sins, believe more or less in freewill

Love brings to light the lofty and hidden characteristics of the lover--what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it caneasily be deceptive with respect to what is normal in him.

Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.

Love, after all, always said more about those who felt it than it did about the ones they loved.

Man’s will is free to follow his inclinations, but fallen man’s inclinations are always and invariably away from God.

For better or for worse, music is the language of memory. It is also the language of love.

The Christian has a great advantage over other men, not by being less fallen than they, nor less doomed to live in a fallen world, but by knowing that he is a fallen man in a fallen world.

A garden was the primitive prison, till man with Promethean felicity and boldness, luckily sinned himself out of it.

Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.

What is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love; and what a misanthrope, but one who does not, or will not, see in man a ruling principle of kindness?

Waiters will always pee in soup, people will always fall in love.

It's still a mystery to me exactly how I learned the language. [But] I was 19 years old and I had very urgent things to tell girls.

If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature.

There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who have seen the Taj Mahal and love it and those who have not seen the Taj and love it.

Some philosophers tell us that selfishness is at the root of our best loves and affections. Mr. Dombey's young child was, from the beginning, so distinctly important to him as a part of his own greatness, or (which is the same thing) of the greatness of Dombey and Son, that there is no doubt his parental affection might have been easily traced, like many a goodly superstructure of fair fame, to a very low foundation.

When the eye is unobstructed, the result is sight. When the ear is unobstructed, the result is hearing. When the mind is unobstructed the result is truth. When the heart is unobstructed, the result is joy and love.

Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

Why, you might just as well say that, I see what I eat, is the same as, I eat what I see.

Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not.

Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn't the way they actually are... People are different when you can smell them and see them up close.

Next to ‘God’, ‘love’ is the word most mangled in every language.