Skip to content
John Steinbeck
Quotes by John Steinbeck
Quotes by John Steinbeck
“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.”
John Steinbeck
“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
“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
John Steinbeck
“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.”
John Steinbeck
“A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.”
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.”
John Steinbeck
“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.”
John Steinbeck
“Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.”
John Steinbeck
“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.”
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
“No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.”
John Steinbeck
“In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”
John Steinbeck
“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.”
John Steinbeck
“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”
John Steinbeck
“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.”
John Steinbeck
“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.”
John Steinbeck
“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.”
John Steinbeck
“Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.”
John Steinbeck
“I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.”
John Steinbeck
“I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.”
John Steinbeck
“We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.”
John Steinbeck
“Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.”
John Steinbeck
“I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.”
John Steinbeck
“One can find so many pains when the rain is falling.”
John Steinbeck
“Unless a reviewer has the courage to give you unqualified praise, I say ignore the bastard.”
John Steinbeck
“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
“No one wants advice - only corroboration.”
John Steinbeck
“The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.”
John Steinbeck
“I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
John Steinbeck
“It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.”
John Steinbeck
