Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.”

— John Steinbeck

102. “How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?”

— John Steinbeck

103. “There’s a responsibility in being a person. It’s more than just taking up space where air would be.”

— John Steinbeck

104. “And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”

— John Steinbeck

105. “And their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels.”

— John Steinbeck

106. “My imagination will get me a passport to hell one day.”

— John Steinbeck

107. “Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of a human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.”

— John Steinbeck

108. “What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.”

— John Steinbeck

109. “No one wants advice – only corroboration.”

— John Steinbeck

110. “A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

112. “Riches seem to come to the poor in spirit, the poor in interest and joy. To put it straight – the very rich are a poor bunch of bastards.”

— John Steinbeck

113. “Timshel- thou mayest.”

— John Steinbeck

114. “Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.”

— John Steinbeck

115. “I write because I like to write. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythm of words. It is a satisfaction like that which follows good and shared love.”

— John Steinbeck

116. “The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.”

— John Steinbeck

117. “The human is the only guilty animal.”

— John Steinbeck

118. “The words are meaningless except in terms of feeling. Does anyone act as the result of thought or does feeling stimulate action and sometimes thought implement it.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

120. “I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It’s bad theater as well as bad living.”

— John Steinbeck

121. “Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.”

— John Steinbeck

122. “Books ain’t no good. A guy needs somebody – to be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody.”

— John Steinbeck

123. “A man on a horse is spiritually, as well as physically, bigger then a man on foot.”

— John Steinbeck

124. “The trash and litter of nature disappears into the ground with the passing of each year, but man’s litter has more permanence.”

— John Steinbeck

125. “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

— John Steinbeck

126. “Man has a choice and it’s a choice that makes him a man.”

— John Steinbeck

127. “Crooks avoided the whole subject now. “Maybe you guys better go,” he said. “I ain’t sure I want you in here no more. A colored man got to have some rights even if he don’t like ’em.”

— John Steinbeck

128. “In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

130. “Death was a friend, and sleep was Death’s brother.”

— John Steinbeck

131. “Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?”

— John Steinbeck

132. “An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There’s a punishment for it, and it’s usually crucifixion.”

— John Steinbeck

133. “Time is the only critic without ambition.”

— John Steinbeck

134. “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

135. “Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create – this is man.”

— John Steinbeck

136. “The flies have conquered the flypaper.”

— John Steinbeck

137. “Thoughts are slow and deep and golden in the morning.”

— John Steinbeck

138. “Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.”

— John Steinbeck

139. “And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”

— John Steinbeck

140. “Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world.”

— John Steinbeck

141. “Strength and success; they are above morality, above criticism. It seems then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it.”

— John Steinbeck

142. “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.”

— John Steinbeck

143. “Rich, poor, Panhandle, Gulf, city, country, Texas is the obsession, the proper study, and the passionate possession of all Texans.”

— John Steinbeck

144. “Why don’t you go on west to California? There’s work there, and it never gets cold. Why, you can reach out anywhere and pick an orange. Why, there’s always some kind of crop to work in. Why don’t you go there?”

— John Steinbeck

145. “Out of all this struggle a good thing is going to grow. That makes it worthwhile.”

— John Steinbeck

146. “Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion.”

— John Steinbeck

147. “Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.”

— John Steinbeck

148. “Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.”

— John Steinbeck

149. “Once Charley fell in love with a dachshund, a romance racially unsuitable, physically ridiculous, and mechanically impossible. But all these problems Charley ignored. He loved deeply and tried dogfully.”

— John Steinbeck

150. “This I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.”

— John Steinbeck