We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.

About This Quote

When we speak, we sound like robots. We no longer sing. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death. The main reason why we talk like machines is because we’re trying to be smart.

We’re trying to make ourselves look better than we really are. Also, our speech has become monotone and boring. We no longer speak using words or phrases that build up to something powerful or meaningful.

We just use our words as tools for getting what we need. Over time, we forget how to communicate meaningfully and instead just go through the motions of doing something that doesn’t matter.

Source: Errata: An Examined Life

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More Quotes By George Steiner

1. When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

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2. We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.

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3. Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

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5. The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).

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