quotes by John Steinbeck

"No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself"
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent (Penguin Modern Classics))

"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love"
— John Steinbeck

"“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.“"
— John Steinbeck

" But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.’ "
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden (Centennial Edition))

"When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people."
— John Steinbeck

"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?"
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden (Centennial Edition))

"You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?"
— John Steinbeck (Sweet Thursday)

"I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible. "
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden (Centennial Edition))

"I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley in Search of America)

""You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff""
— John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath (Centennial Edition))

"It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)

"When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgements are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden (Centennial Edition))

"All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal."
— John Steinbeck

"As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment."
— John Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men (Centennial Edition))

"It has always seemed strange to me...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."
— John Steinbeck (Cannery Row (Centennial Edition))

"It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way. "
— John Steinbeck

"For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland."
— John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America (Centennial Edition))

"Anything that just costs money is cheap."
— John Steinbeck