George Steiner

“The silence of a book is a different silence from the silence of a stone.”

“We invent what we love and what we fear.”

“The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.”

“What we read, we are.”

“We are guests of existence, not its masters.”

“When a language dies, a way of seeing the world dies with it.”

“Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.”

“A great piece of music is a checkmate to time.”

“To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world.”

“The past is not behind us, but within us.”

“Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence.”

“The critic is the guardian of quality.”

“Every book is a risk.”

“The poem is the house of language.”

“Civilization is a parenthesis, a brief and precarious interlude.”

“To be a Jew is a destiny.”

“A book is a companion, a teacher, and a friend.”