John Steinbeck Quotes

510 Sourced Quotes

For a while I was a vicious fighter but it wasn't to win. It was to get it over and get the hell out of there. And I never would have done it at all if other people hadn't put me in the ring. The only private fights I ever had were those I couldn't get away from.

John Steinbeck
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. It might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

John Steinbeck
A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, and sick.

John Steinbeck
And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "Use it well, use it wisely.

John Steinbeck
Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork.

John Steinbeck
Don't ever ask directions of a Maine native, I was told.
Why ever not?
Somehow we think it is funny to misdirect people and we don't smile when we do it, but we laugh inwardly. It is our nature.

John Steinbeck
You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

John Steinbeck
But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe.

John Steinbeck
Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.

John Steinbeck
And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history; repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.

John Steinbeck
Lennie said quietly, "It ain't no lie. We're gonna do it. Gonna get a little place an' live on the fatta the lan'.

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

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

John Steinbeck
It is not good to want a thing too much. It sometimes drives the luck away. You must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with Gods or the gods.

John Steinbeck
A book is like a man — clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

John Steinbeck
I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

John Steinbeck
It is odd how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place — everyone must have one, although I have never heard of a man tell of it.

John Steinbeck
Give me a used Bible and I will, I think, be able to tell you about a man by the places that are edged with the dirt of seeking fingers.

John Steinbeck
Maybe you're playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.

John Steinbeck
I have no choice of living or dying, you see, sir—but I do have a choice of how I do it. If I tell them not to fight, they will be sorry, but they will fight. If I tell them to fight, they will be glad, and I who am not a very brave man will have made them a little braver.

John Steinbeck
These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.

John Steinbeck
Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole.

John Steinbeck
It has always been my private conviction that any man who pits his intelligence against a fish and loses has it coming.

John Steinbeck
I seen it over an' over—a guy talkin' to another guy and it don't make no difference if he don't hear or understand. The thing is, they're talkin', or they're settin' still not talkin'. It don't make no difference, no difference. [...] George can tell you screwy things, and it don't matter. It's just the talking. It's just bein' with another guy. That's all.

John Steinbeck
You ain't worth a greased lack pin to ram you into hell.

John Steinbeck
The nicest thing in the world you can do for anybody is let them help you.

John Steinbeck
The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.

John Steinbeck
A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the glory-so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished.

John Steinbeck
Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life - so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.

John Steinbeck
No gift will ever buy back a man's love when you have removed his self-love.

John Steinbeck