I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result, I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.

—George Steiner

education poetry heart memorization

About George Steiner

Portrait of George Steiner

Francis George Steiner, FBA (April 23, 1929 – February 3, 2020) was a French and American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist and educator. He wrote extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, as well as the impact of the Holocaust. A 2001 article in The Guardian described Steiner...

More quotations from George Steiner

A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.

—George Steiner

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

—George Steiner

reality silence language

More quotations tagged with “heart”

Whoever said it got easier with time was wrong, death never got easier. The pain dulls around your heart, numbing the spot the deceased inhabited in your chest—but it was never easier. Loss was still loss—a physical pain, a hurt that reaches deep inside you and smothers your soul, forever indenting their memory.

—Kelsie Leverich in The Valentine’s Arrangement

memory soul pain heart loss

Love is when you don't have to be with another person to touch their heart!

—Torquato Tasso

love heart distance

Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.

—Douglas William Jerrold

self happiness heart growth

Only do what your heart tells you.

—Princess Diana

feeling action emotions heart

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.

—Robert M. Pirsig

progress change heart head hands improve

History

15 Feb 2014 Added