George Steiner Quotes

What can be shown, cannot be said.

I don't think that the spoken words solve everything. Sometimes silence delivers truer feelings while the words can distort the meaning in some situations.

Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality.

It is commonly thought that everything that is can be put into words.

What we cannot think we cannot think, therefore we also cannot say what we cannot think.

A lot of people understand what not saying anything means, so, in effect, not saying anything is really saying a lot.

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

The most profound statements are often said in silence.

I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak.

Some things we must pass over in silence.

Words do have a limited range of meaning, and no interpretation that goes beyond that range is permissible.

Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist.

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?

Those who violate the rules of a language do not enter new territory; they leave the domain of meaningful discourse. Even facts in these circumstances dissolve, because they are shaped by the language and subjected to its limitations.

The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

More wisdom is latent in things as they are than in all the words men use.

What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts.

To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.

Reality is the page. Life is the word.

Tall windows show Infinity; And, hard reality, The candles weep and pry and dance Like lives mocked at by Chance. The rooms are vast as Sleep within; When once I ventured in, Chill Silence, like a surging sea, Slowly enveloped me.

The heart cherishes secrets not worth the telling

Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.

Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.

We don't say nothing more. What else is there to say? Everything and nothing. You can't say everything, so you don't say nothing.