Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck Quotes
510 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton woool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
There are good things to see in the tide pools and there are exciting and interesting thoughts to be generated from the seeing. Every new eye applied to the peep hole which looks out at the world may fish in some new beauty and some new pattern, and the world of the human mind must be enriched by such fishing.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
I remember as a child reading or hearing the words 'The Great Divide' and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent. I saw in my mind escarpments rising into the clouds, a kind of natural Great Wall of China.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
Hate cannot live alone. It must have love as a trigger, a goad, or a stimulant.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
When a hypothesis is deeply accepted it becomes a growth which only a kind of surgery can amputate.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
I need a dog pretty badly. I dreamed of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
My wants are simple. I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and power and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
A study of animal communities has this advantage: they are merely what they are, for anyone to see who will and can look clearly; they cannot complicate the picture by worded idealisms, by saying one thing and being another; here the struggle is unmasked and the beauty is unmasked.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
It was too nerve-wracking, a shocking spectacle, like seeing an old, calm friend go insane.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
Charley is a mind-reading dog. There have been many trips in his lifetime, and often he has to be left at home. He knows we are going long before the suitcase has come out, and he paces and worries and whines and goes into a state of mild hysteria.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
For many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that's what he wants. Mostly it's women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
The dairy man had a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he must have had some training in philosophy. He liked what he was doing and he didn't want to be somewhere else - one of the few contented people I met in my whole journey.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous...but not quite.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.
Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world — of all living things.
The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand.
Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.
Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope.
So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man — and the Word is with Men.
John Steinbeck
Source
Report...
The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.
John Steinbeck
1
...
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
...
21
Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
John Steinbeck
Creative Commons
Born:
February 27, 1902
Died:
December 20, 1968
(aged 66)
Bio:
John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books, and five collections of short stories.
Known for:
Of Mice and Men (1937)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
East of Eden (1952)
Cannery Row (1945)
The Pearl (1947)
Most used words:
man
people
time
love
place
life
day
kind
true
fight
understand
find
years
thought
story
John Steinbeck on Wikipedia
John Steinbeck works on Wikisource
Suggest an edit or a new quote
John Steinbeck Quotes
John Steinbeck Short Quotes
Quotes about John Steinbeck
American Screenwriter Quotes
Screenwriter Quotes
20th-century Screenwriter Quotes
Related People
William Faulkner
American Author
Ernest Hemingway
American Journalist
F. Scott Fitzgerald
American Novelist
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes