Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen. It’s scary to think about. Point of reference again. When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people.”

— John Steinbeck

53. “Just set one day’s work in front of the last day’s work. That’s the way it comes out. And that’s the only way it does.”

— John Steinbeck

54. “Do not feel fear because if you live your life in fear you’re not living your hiding.”

— John Steinbeck

55. “I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.”

— John Steinbeck

56. “There is comfort in routine.”

— John Steinbeck

57. “Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.”

— John Steinbeck

58. “Positano bites deep. It is a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

60. “To finish is a sadness to a writer – a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.”

— John Steinbeck

61. “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.”

— John Steinbeck

62. “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.”

— John Steinbeck

63. “It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.”

— John Steinbeck

64. “You can boast about anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.”

— John Steinbeck

65. “If you understand each other you will be kind to each other.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

67. “The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.”

— John Steinbeck

68. “Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.”

— John Steinbeck

69. “What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.”

— John Steinbeck

70. “It is the hour of pearl – the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.”

— John Steinbeck

71. “A little hope, even hopeless hope, never hurt anybody.”

— John Steinbeck

72. “We only have one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.”

— John Steinbeck

73. “I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”

— John Steinbeck

74. “To be alive at all is to have scars.”

— John Steinbeck

75. “I believe that love cannot be bought except with love.”

— John Steinbeck

76. “Only mediocrity escapes criticism.”

— John Steinbeck

77. “I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many years of preparation preceded it.”

— John Steinbeck

78. “Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

80. “Our people are good people; our people are kind people. Pray God some day kind people won’t all be poor.”

— John Steinbeck

81. “Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain...”

— John Steinbeck

82. “Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.”

— John Steinbeck

83. “It seems to me Montana is a great splash of grandeur. The scale is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda.”

— John Steinbeck

84. “Luck, you see, brings bitter friends.”

— John Steinbeck

85. “I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security – out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.”

— John Steinbeck

86. “No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe.”

— John Steinbeck

87. “There are no ugly questions except those clothed in condescension.”

— John Steinbeck

88. “Some people there are who, being grown; forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child.”

— John Steinbeck

89. “People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don’t dream at all.”

— John Steinbeck

90. “Sometimes, a lie is told in kindness. I don’t believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost.”

— John Steinbeck

91. “People don’t take trips – trips take people.”

— John Steinbeck

92. “It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another-but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.”

— John Steinbeck

93. “Trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice; once to make mistakes and once to correct them.”

— John Steinbeck

94. “I know three things will never be believed – the true, the probable, and the logical.”

— John Steinbeck

95. “There is nothing in the world like the first taste of beer.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

97. “At about 10 o’clock in the morning the sun threw a bright dust-laden bar through one of the side windows and in and out of the beam flies shot like rushing stars.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

99. “There are two kinds of people in the world, observers and non-observers...”

— John Steinbeck

100. “A man without words is a man without thought.”

— John Steinbeck