John Steinbeck - Man Quotes

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

John Steinbeck
The President must be greater than anyone else, but not better than anyone else. We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things that we ourselves do every day. A Presidential slip of the tongue, a slight error in judgment — social, political, or ethical — can raise a storm of protest. We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him.

John Steinbeck
To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

John Steinbeck
There's that fallow land, and here beside me is that fallow man. It seems a waste.

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

John Steinbeck
And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man.

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

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
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going.

John Steinbeck
I am a little man and this is a little town, but there must be a spark in little men that can burst into flame.

John Steinbeck
Man is related... inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable.. [P]lankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

John Steinbeck
For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism - either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. The last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.

John Steinbeck
For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.

John Steinbeck
In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind-but he must get there first.

John Steinbeck
But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there.

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
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
I guess a man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, and then steps in it.

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
It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don't know and don't hate.

John Steinbeck
A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. Remember this thing. I have known boys forty years old because there was no need for a man:

John Steinbeck
And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.

John Steinbeck
And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

John Steinbeck
That man who is more then his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.

John Steinbeck
Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels. They gathered mountains and valleys, rivers and whole horizons, the way a man might now gain tittle to building lots.

John Steinbeck
The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart...

John Steinbeck
No one knows how greatness comes to a man. It may lie in his blackness, sleeping, or it may lance into him like those driven fiery particles from outer space. These things, however, are known about greatness: need gives it life and puts it in action; it never comes without pain; it leaves a man changed, chastened, and exalted at the same time — he can never return to simplicity.

John Steinbeck
All Americans believe that they are born fishermen. For a man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother-love or hating moonlight.

John Steinbeck
It is strange 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 never heard a man tell of it.

John Steinbeck