Top 697 Quotes & Sayings by John Steinbeck

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.

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

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

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.

There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.

No one wants advice - only corroboration.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

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

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

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

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

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

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.

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

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.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

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.

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

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

Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

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

Time is the only critic without ambition.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

So in our pride we ordered for breakfast an omelet, toast and coffee and what has just arrived is a tomato salad with onions, a dish of pickles, a big slice of watermelon and two bottles of cream soda.

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.

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.

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.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

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

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.

Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

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.

Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

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.

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

If you understand each other you will be kind to each other.

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.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.

To be alive at all is to have scars.

If you want to destroy a nation, give it too much - make it greedy, miserable and sick.

And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

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

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.

Only mediocrity escapes criticism.

Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don't talk back.

Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk.

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

If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.