Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “An ocean without unnamed monsters would be like sleep without dreams.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

103. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

105. “Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

109. “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

110. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

113. “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

114. “The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.”

— John Steinbeck

115. “Timshel- thou mayest.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

117. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

124. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

126. “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

127. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

129. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

132. “Teachers don’t just teach; they can be vital personalities who help young people to mature, to understand the world, and to understand themselves. A good education consists of much more than useful facts and marketable skills.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

134. “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

135. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

138. “The flies have conquered the flypaper.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

141. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

149. “Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck