John Steinbeck Quotes

Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.

And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.

I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.

When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.

If you understand each other you will be kind to each other.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.

Only mediocrity escapes criticism.

It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.

I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.

The last clear definite function of man — muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need — this is man.

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.

Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why.

It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

This I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.

The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

A man without words is a man without thought.

A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down the river.

No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe

To be alive at all is to have scars.

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

There are two kinds of people in the world, observers and non-observers.

Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

All great and precious things are lonely.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

Oh, the strawberries don't taste as they used to and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!

With all our horrors and faults, somewhere in us there is a shining.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.

For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.

My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other.