George Steiner Quotes

I'm very passionate about philosophy and religion.

Philosophy is an attempt by man to find cause and effect. Religion has the same goal.

If I wanted to doubt, then I could doubt endlessly, but at some point a person has to stop questioning and act, and at that point you have to trust something to be true. You have to act as if something is true, and so you choose the thing you have the most reason to believe in, you have to live in the world that you have the most hope in.

The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them

Philosophy is an odd thing. When we use the word in everyday speech, you know, you sometimes hear it hilariously.

If there was no faith there would be no living in this world. We could not even eat hash with any safety.

Not truth, but faith, it is that keeps the world alive.

Either theology is pure nonsense, a subject with no content, or else theology must ultimately become a branch of physics.

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.

Faith is more basic than language or theology.

In order to have peace in the Middle East both sides are going to have to put away history and make a leap of faith.

There is no philosophy that is not to some extent also theology.

Science and religion are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it's the same universe with two different windows.

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

Credo quia absurdum – I believe because it is absurd.

There is one fact that can be established. The only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing

Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything.

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.

Science and religion have to go hand in hand with the mystery, because there's a certain point beyond which you say, "There are no answers."

What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words.... Be not the slave of Words.

Philosophy, with the aid of experience, has at length banished the study of alchymy; and the present age, however desirous of riches, is content to seek them by the humbler means of commerce and industry.

Christ is the great central fact in the world's history. To Him everything looks forward or backward. All the lines of history converge upon Him.