John Steinbeck Quotes
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.
A great politician is impossible without a great tragedy.
We are all immigrants in a sense, moving from somewhere to somewhere else.
The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.
Time is the only critic without ambition.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
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.
Ideas are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides and following them, you will reach your destiny.
The best of your work will come out when you are honestly and openly yourself.
You can’t control every outcome, but you can control your own actions.
The writer must believe in the value and interest of his own work in order to get anyone else to.
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
No man really knows about other human beings.
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
There is no greater beauty than that which we find in nature.
The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.
Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it.
We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome.
It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.
I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught ― in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too ― in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well ― or ill?
When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.
No individual on this earth has the right to come into this world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.
What is genius? It is the power to be a boy again at will.
Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.
I think we all have so much more in us than we know. Life is just a matter of trying to unlock it.
If you’re in trouble, or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.
For 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.
The final weapon is the brain. All else is supplemental.
Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious.
The great book for you is the book that has the most to say to you at the moment when you are reading. I do not mean the book that is most instructive, but the book that feeds your spirit. And that depends on your age, your experience, your psychological and spiritual need.
You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.
It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
Man it is not for glory, no riches, no worldly honors, that we are fighting for, we are fighting for a world that will not shame children…
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
You cannot understand the brutality of a thing unless you have been there and seen it.
There is great responsibility on everyone to be a part of the passion and hope and need of their time.
Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it’s unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies. We project angels, strangers, onto them. We insist: I see wings.
We are strange beings, are we not, we humans? To bring a child into this ever-darkening world?
We are homesick most for the places we have never known.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
The writer must be beligerent, the accomplishment of his work something seen against society and therefore villainous…
A map is the dead body of geography, preserved in a formaldehyde of inches, scales, and symbols.
Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.
All great and precious things are lonely.
No one in the world ever gets what they want, and that is beautiful.
I have lost my dread of what’s different, I simply put it in perspective.