The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital.

" They later married in 1955 the year he received his PhD from Oxford University. Awards and honors
George Steiner has received many honors including:
A Rhodes Scholarship (1950)
A Guggenheim Fellowship (1971–72)
Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French Government (1984)
The Morton Dauwen Zaubel Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters (1989)
The King Albert Medal by the Belgian Academy Council of Applied Sciences
An honorary fellow of Balliol College at the University of Oxford (1995)
The Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award by Stanford University (1998)
The Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities (2001)
Fellowship of the British Academy
Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts
Honorary Doctorate of Literature degrees from:
University of East Anglia (1976)
University of Leuven (1980)
Mount Holyoke College (1983)
Bristol University (1989)
University of Glasgow (1990)
University of Liège (1990)
University of Ulster (1993)
Durham University (1995)
Queen Mary University of London (2006)
Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna (2006)
Honoris Causa - Faculty of Letters - University of Lisbon (2009)

He has also won numerous awards for his fiction and poetry including:
Remembrance Award (1974) for Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966. Steiner's first formal education took place at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in Paris.

" Harriet Harvey-Wood a former literature director of the British Council saw him as a "magnificent lecturer – prophetic and doom-laden [who would] turn up with half a page of scribbled notes and never refer to them. An article in The Guardian described Steiner as a "polyglot and polymath" saying that he is "often credited with recasting the role of the critic". S.