Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Self-Worth Quotes, Short Positive Quotes, Self-Realization Quotes, Fiction Quotes, Different Quotes

2. “All great and precious things are lonely.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Fiction Quotes, Loneliness Quotes, Lonely Quotes, Feeling Alone Quotes, Solitude Quotes

3. “I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Life Quotes, Fiction Quotes, Quotes About Humanity

4. “Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Broken Heart Quotes

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

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Fighting Quotes

6. “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

8. “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

Featured in: Teaching Quotes, School Quotes, Teacher Appreciation Quotes

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

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Empathy Quotes, Human Nature Quotes

10. “I’m in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection. But with Montana it is love. And it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it.”

— John Steinbeck

11. “You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.”

— John Steinbeck

12. “A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Mental Health Quotes, Sad Quotes, Sorrow Quotes, Depression Quotes, Loneliness Quotes

13. “It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Sad Quotes About Life

14. “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness? You only truly, deeply appreciate and are grateful for something when you compare and contrast it to something worse.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Life is Hard Quotes, Opposites Quotes, Summer Quotes

15. “I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”

— John Steinbeck

16. “In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Summer Quotes, Flower Quotes

17. “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Winter Quotes

18. “A boy becomes a man when a man is needed.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Struggle Quotes

20. “If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule – a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

21. “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

22. “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

Featured in: Love Life Quotes, Strong Women Quotes, Being Strong Quotes

23. “Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don’t talk back.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Book Quotes

24. “I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that’s why.”

— John Steinbeck

25. “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say.”

— John Steinbeck

26. “In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.”

— John Steinbeck

27. “I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”

— John Steinbeck

28. “The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplemental.”

— John Steinbeck

29. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

31. “I carry a gun cause a cop is too heavy.”

— John Steinbeck

32. “When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.”

— John Steinbeck

33. “Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish.”

— John Steinbeck

34. “I guess there are never enough books.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

35. “Texas is a state of mind. Texas is an obsession. Above all else, Texas is a nation in every sense of the word.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

37. “Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”

— John Steinbeck

Featured in: Loneliness Quotes

38. “Montana seems to me to be what a small boy would think Texas is like from hearing Texans.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

40. “We could live offa the fatta the lan’.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

43. “There’s more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

45. “Being at ease with himself put him at ease with the world.”

— John Steinbeck

46. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

48. “Anything that just costs money is cheap.”

— John Steinbeck

49. “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

50. “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