Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2023 Update)
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451. “If a man ordered a beer milkshake he’d better do it in a town where he wasn’t known.”

— John Steinbeck

452. “Maybe – maybe love makes you suspicious and doubting. Is it true that when you love a woman you are never sure – never sure of her because you aren’t sure of yourself?”

— John Steinbeck

453. “I see hundreds of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads. Hundreds of them. They come, an’ they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ‘em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out there. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody never gets no land. It’s just in their head.”

— John Steinbeck

454. “Adam fluttered like a bewildered bee confused by too many flowers.”

— John Steinbeck

455. “Socialism never took root in America.”

— John Steinbeck

456. “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.”

— John Steinbeck

457. “One day we’ll sit and you’ll lay it out on the table, neat like a solitaire deck, but now – why, you can’t find all the cards.”

— John Steinbeck

458. “There is no term comparable to green thumbs to apply to such a mechanic, but there should be. For there are men who can look, listen, tap, make an adjustment, and a machine works.”

— John Steinbeck

459. “Lead ’em around and around,’’ said Joad. “Sling ’em in the irrigation ditch. Tell ’em they’ll burn in hell if they don’t think like you. What the hell you want to lead ’em someplace for? Jus’ lead ’em.”

— John Steinbeck

460. “The break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath.”

— John Steinbeck

461. “The weight of knowledge is too great for one mind to absorb.”

— John Steinbeck

462. “And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing – maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed – because ‘thou mayest’.”

— John Steinbeck

463. “Any man of reasonable intelligence can make money if that’s what he wants. Mostly it’s women or clothes or admiration he really wants and they deflect him.”

— John Steinbeck

464. “When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.”

— John Steinbeck

465. “So many old and lovely things are stored in the world’s attic because we don’t want them around us and we don’t dare throw them out.”

— John Steinbeck

466. “He was born in fury and he lived in lightning.”

— John Steinbeck

467. “It was well known that Liza Hamilton and the Lord God held similar convictions on nearly every subject.”

— John Steinbeck

468. “I don’t very much believe in blood,” said Samuel. “I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.” “You can’t make a race horse of a pig.” “No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”

— John Steinbeck

469. “I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be read.”

— John Steinbeck

470. “One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction.”

— John Steinbeck

471. “In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence, but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself.”

— John Steinbeck

472. “Teresina went often to confession. She was the despair of Father Ramon. Indeed he had seen that while her knees, her hands, and her lips did penance for an old sin, her modest and provocative eyes, flashing under drawn lashes, laid the foundation for a new one. During.”

— John Steinbeck

473. “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.”

— John Steinbeck

474. “He had an idea that even when beaten he could steal a little victory by laughing at defeat.”

— John Steinbeck

475. “Lanser said, “There are no peaceful people, when will you learn it? There are no friendly people, can’t you understand that?”

— John Steinbeck

476. “I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one.”

— John Steinbeck

477. “I wonder why it is that when I plan a route too carefully, it goes to pieces, whereas if I blunder along in blissful ignorance aimed in a fancied direction I get through with no trouble.”

— John Steinbeck

478. “Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.”

— John Steinbeck

479. “It requires self-esteem to receive-not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.”

— John Steinbeck

480. “Failure is a state of mind. It’s like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.”

— John Steinbeck

481. “Her great-great-great-great-great grandmother had been burned as a witch.”

— John Steinbeck

482. “When you’re a child you’re the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They’re only ghosts furnished for you to talk to.”

— John Steinbeck

483. “A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it.”

— John Steinbeck

484. “I don’t know what directed his steps toward the Salinas Valley. It was an unlikely place for a man from a green country to come to, but he came about thirty years before the turn of the century and brought with him his tiny Irish wife, a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken. She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.”

— John Steinbeck

485. “But a man needs company.”

— John Steinbeck

486. “He can kill anything for need but he could not even hurt a feeling for pleasure.”

— John Steinbeck

487. “What hidden, hoarded longings there are in all of us.”

— John Steinbeck

488. “I have wondered why is it that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death that others.”

— John Steinbeck

489. “Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.”

— John Steinbeck

490. “A light in the daytime is a lonely thing.”

— John Steinbeck

491. “Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears that the solar system of stars.”

— John Steinbeck

492. “We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.”

— John Steinbeck

493. “Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.”

— John Steinbeck

494. “For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis.”

— John Steinbeck

495. “Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world, of all living things.”

— John Steinbeck

496. “This I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected.”

— John Steinbeck

497. “Texas has a tight cohesiveness perhaps stronger than any other section of America.”

— John Steinbeck

498. “There are people who will say that this whole account is a lie, but a thing isn’t necessarily a lie even if it didn’t necessarily happen.”

— John Steinbeck

499. “Charley is a mind-reading dog. There have been many trips in his lifetime, and often he has to be left at home. He knows we are going long before the suitcase has come out, and he paces and worries and whines and goes into a state of mild hysteria.”

— John Steinbeck

500. “What do I want in a doctor? Perhaps more than anything else-a friend with special knowledge.”

— John Steinbeck