John Steinbeck Quotes

510 Sourced Quotes

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
The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous...but not quite.

John Steinbeck
When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something—anything—before it is all gone.

John Steinbeck
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
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
Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.

John Steinbeck
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
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
When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

John Steinbeck
My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other...

John Steinbeck
It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?

John Steinbeck
The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

John Steinbeck
Liza poured thick batter from a pitcher onto a soapstone griddle. The hot cakes rose like little hassocks, and small volcanoes formed and erupted on them until they were ready to be turned. A cheerful brown, they were, with tracings of darker brown. And the kitchen was full of the good sweet smell of them.

John Steinbeck
The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.

John Steinbeck
The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.

John Steinbeck
How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?

John Steinbeck
In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.

John Steinbeck
Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion.

John Steinbeck
I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.

John Steinbeck
If you are in love-that's a good thing-that's about the best thing that can happen to anyone.

John Steinbeck
One pays for everything, the trick is not to pay too much of anything for anything.

John Steinbeck
A man is a very important thing-maybe more important than a star.

John Steinbeck
The difficulty of course is that I like women. It is only wives I am in trouble with.

John Steinbeck
Everyone I have ever known very well has been concerned that I would eventually starve. Probably I shall. It isn't important enough to me to be an obsession.

John Steinbeck
I have taken as much as six years to prepare a book for writing. There is such a delirium of effort in the production of a book; it's like childbirth. And, like childbirth, one forgets the pains immediately so that when you come to write another one you dare to take it up again. Some precious anesthesia sees you through.

John Steinbeck
I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be read.

John Steinbeck
There is no term comparable to green thumbs to apply to such a mechanic, but there should be. For there are men who can look, listen, tap, make an adjustment, and a machine works.

John Steinbeck
I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It's bad theater as well as bad living.

John Steinbeck
Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.

John Steinbeck
I had been practicing for the Depression a long time. I wasn't involved with loss. I didn't have money to lose, but in common with millions I did dislike hunger and cold.

John Steinbeck