1. People
    2.  › 
  2. John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck photo

John Steinbeck Quotes

Total quotes: 91
“It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.”
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
Tagged: Routine, Change, Hate
“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? …Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Tagged: Pain, Self Absorbed, Misery, Self-Pity
“That’s why I’m talking to you. You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.”
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden(Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)
Tagged: Observation, preconception, People, Expectation
“In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.”
— John Steinbeck, The Winter Of Our Discontent
Tagged: June, Summer, Exploding, Summer Feels
“There’s a responsibility in being a person. It’s more than just taking up space where air would be.”
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Tagged: Responsibility, Effort, Living, Works
“And the stars down so close, and sadness and pleasure so close together, really the same thing”
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Tagged: Sadness, Together, Deep
“Don’t make everyone know about your sadness.”
— John Steinbeck, Untitled
Tagged: Sadness, Depression
“You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.”
— John Steinbeck, A John Steinbeck Reader: Essays in Honor of Stephen K. George
Tagged: understand people, Understanding, comprehending, Feelings, Empathy
“My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.”
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Tagged: Imagination
“I have always lived violently…eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.”
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Tagged: Awesome, Living
“Not only the brave get killed, but the brave have a better chance of it.”
— John Steinbeck, The Winter Of Our Discontent
“… we've got so many laws you can't breathe without breaking something.”
— John Steinbeck, The Winter Of Our Discontent
“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America
Tagged: Marriage, Dating
“Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.”
— John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
Tagged: kindness, Compassion, Intelligence
“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?”
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Tagged: Past, Memories, Time
“Fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.”
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Tagged: Death, Sacrifice, Suffering, Fear
“Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, and emerges ahead of his accomplishments.”
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Tagged: humanity, Growth, accomplishments
“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, The Pearl
Tagged: Goals, God, desires
“You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.”
— John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent (Penguin Classics)
Tagged: Past, present, Future, Time
“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
Tagged: Grief, Grieving, Loss, Darkness, Light
“You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.”
— John Steinbeck, I Had a Nice Time And Other Lies...: How to find love & sh*t like that
Tagged: Dating Advice, Guy Advice, Relationship
“Does anyone ever know even the outer fringe of another? What are you like in there? Mary — do you hear? Who are you in there?”
— John Steinbeck, The Winter Of Our Discontent
“The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.”
— John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America
“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, Travels With Charley: In Search of America
“They successfully combined piracy and puritanism, which aren't so unlike when you come right down to it. Both had a strong dislike for opposition and both had a roving eye for other people's property.”
— John Steinbeck, The Winter Of Our Discontent
“He wasn't involved with a race that could build a thing it had to escape from.”
— John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America
“The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.”
— John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America
“The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.”
— John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America
“When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you got two new people. Maybe that means — hell, it's complicated.”
— John Steinbeck, The Winter Of Our Discontent
“For man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.”
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get none under their hand.”
— John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
“Strength and success— they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it.”
— John Steinbeck, The Winter Of Our Discontent
“Sometimes it's great fun to be silly, like children playing statues and dying of laughter. And sometimes being silly breaks the even pace and lets you get a new start.”
— John Steinbeck, The Winter Of Our Discontent
“What the hell kind of bed you giving us, anyways. We don’t want no pants rabbits.”
— John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
“Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody — to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.”
— John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
“What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.”
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Tagged: Winter, Summer, Beauty In Contrasts
“A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.”
— John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
Tagged: first lines of books, California, Monterey County
“The killing of a man was not so evil as the killing of a boat. For a boat does not have sons, and a boat cannot protect itself, and a wounded boat does not heal.”
— John Steinbeck, The Pearl
Tagged: Murder, Death, Healing
“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 Classics)
Tagged: humanity, differences, similarities
“You know how advice is - you only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyways.”
— John Steinbeck, Cannery Row: (Centennial Edition)
Tagged: Advice, Opinions, agreement
loading next page...