John Steinbeck Quotes

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

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 on the world.

Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

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.

A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.

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.

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

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

It's a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create - this is man.

The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.

It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you "” of kindness and consideration and respect "” not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn't know you had. John Steinbeck in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.

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. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

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.

No one wants advice - only corroboration.

Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

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

A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

I know three things will never be believed - the true, the probable, and the logical

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.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

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

The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die.

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