Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2022 Update)
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101. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

103. “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

104. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

106. “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

107. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

109. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

112. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

115. “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

116. “An ocean without unnamed monsters would be like sleep without dreams.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

122. “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

123. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

126. “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

127. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

129. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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131. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

134. “In poverty she is envious. In riches she may be a snob. Money does not change the sickness, only the symptoms.”

— John Steinbeck

135. “I nearly always write just as I nearly always breathe. – John Steinbeck.”

— John Steinbeck

136. “I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now – only that place where the books are kept.”

— John Steinbeck

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137. “The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

140. “Intention, good or bad, is not enough.”

— John Steinbeck

141. “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

142. “I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.”

— John Steinbeck

143. “You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”

— John Steinbeck

144. “Some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

146. “Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time.”

— John Steinbeck

147. “In nature two things do not occur-the wheel and good taste.”

— John Steinbeck

148. “The candle aimed its spark of light at heaven, like an artist who consumes himself to become divine.”

— John Steinbeck

149. “You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.”

— John Steinbeck

150. “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

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