John Steinbeck Quotes

510 Sourced Quotes

You can't go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.

John Steinbeck
The trash and litter of nature disappears into the ground with the passing of each year, but man's litter has more permanence.

John Steinbeck
Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people—we go on.

John Steinbeck
Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.

John Steinbeck
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lif' up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.

John Steinbeck
What a wonderful thing a woman is. I can admire what they do even if I don't understand why.

John Steinbeck
Up ahead they's a thousan' lives we might live, but when it comes it'll on'y be one.

John Steinbeck
I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness—chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.

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

John Steinbeck
When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.

John Steinbeck
You're getting well,' Samuel said. 'Some people think it's an insult to the glory of their sickness to get well. But the time poultice is no respecter of glories. Everyone gets well if he waits around.

John Steinbeck
The proofs that God does not exist are very strong, but in lots of people they are not as strong as the feeling that He does.

John Steinbeck
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.

John Steinbeck
We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields?

John Steinbeck
I think today if we forbade our illiterate children to touch the wonderful things of our literature, perhaps they might steal them and find secret joy.

John Steinbeck
Why, Tom - us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on.' 'We take a beatin' all the time.' 'I know.' Ma chuckled. 'Maybe that makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin'. Don' you fret none, Tom. A different time's comin'.

John Steinbeck
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.

John Steinbeck
Failure is a state of mind. It's like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.

John Steinbeck
This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.

John Steinbeck
What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately.

John Steinbeck
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.

John Steinbeck
The literature of science is filled with answers found when the question propounded had an entirely different direction and end.

John Steinbeck
They must be real people. And this means that every word in every line of speech must be accurate and full of some kind of meaning which stretches not only forward in the book but stems from before in the book.

John Steinbeck
No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.

John Steinbeck
You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff.

John Steinbeck
It is a nice thing to be working and believing in my work again. I hope I can keep the drive. I only feel whole and well when it is this way.

John Steinbeck
Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches — nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.
The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.

John Steinbeck
The bank - the monster has to have profits all the time. It can't wait. It'll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can't stay one size.

John Steinbeck
That's why I'm talking to you. You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.

John Steinbeck
Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

John Steinbeck