Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world in never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”

— John Steinbeck

252. “So often men trip by being in a rush. If one were properly to perform a difficult and subtle act, he should first inspect the end to be achieved and then, once he had accepted the end as desirable, he should forget it completely and concentrate solely on the means. By this method he would not be moved to false action by anxiety or hurry or fear. Very few people learn this.”

— John Steinbeck

253. “The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.”

— John Steinbeck

254. “I can still tend the rabbits, George? I didn’t mean no harm, George.”

— John Steinbeck

255. “We know what we got, and we don’t care whether you know it or not.”

— John Steinbeck

256. “In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.”

— John Steinbeck

257. “When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you’ve got two new people.”

— John Steinbeck

258. “The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

— John Steinbeck

259. “If you want to destroy a nation, give it too much – make it greedy, miserable and sick.”

— John Steinbeck

260. “You know what it is? San Francisco is a golden handcuff with the key thrown away.”

— John Steinbeck

261. “Well, I never seen one guy take so much trouble for another guy. I just like to know what your interest is.”

— John Steinbeck

262. “People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.”

— John Steinbeck

263. “A stilted heron labored up into the air and pounded down the river.”

— John Steinbeck

264. “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man – and the Word is with Men.”

— John Steinbeck

265. “There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition – because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.”

— John Steinbeck

266. “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”

— John Steinbeck

267. “The people in flight from the terror behind-strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.”

— John Steinbeck

268. “Oh, but strawberries will never taste so good again and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!”

— John Steinbeck

269. “It is advisable to look from the tide pools to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.”

— John Steinbeck

270. “Once you have lived in New York and made it your home, no place else is good enough.”

— John Steinbeck

271. “I’m gettin’ tired way past where sleep rests me.”

— John Steinbeck

272. “I seen too many guys with land in their head. They never get none under their hand.”

— John Steinbeck

273. “We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.”

— John Steinbeck

274. “There wasn’t any limit, no boundary at all, to the future. And it would be so a man wouldn’t have room to store his happiness.”

— John Steinbeck

275. “Don’t roust your faith bird-high an’ you won’t do no crawlin’ with the worms.”

— John Steinbeck

276. “I’m learnin’ one thing good,” she said. “Learnin’ it all a time, ever’ day. If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.”

— John Steinbeck

277. “They fell into a silence. They looked at one another, amazed. This thing they had never really believed in was coming true.”

— John Steinbeck

278. “Must hunger become anger and anger fury before anything will be done?”

— John Steinbeck

279. “She shook her head slowly from side to side. “I’m jus’ pain covered with skin.”

— John Steinbeck

280. “We now face the danger, which in the past has been the most destructive to thehumans: Success, plenty, comfort and ever-increasing leisure. No dynamic peoplehas ever survived these dangers.”

— John Steinbeck

281. “But I do feel strange-almost unearthly. I’ll never get used to being alive. It’s a mystery. Always startled to find I’ve survived.”

— John Steinbeck

282. “Don’t you dare take the lazy way. It’s too easy to excuse yourself because of your ancestry. Don’t let me catch you doing it! Now – look close at me so you will remember. Whatever you do, it will be you who do.”

— John Steinbeck

283. “All we got is the family unbroke.”

— John Steinbeck

284. “Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.”

— John Steinbeck

285. “A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well – or ill?”

— John Steinbeck

286. “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

287. “Lennie said quietly, “It ain’t no lie. We’re gonna do it. Gonna get a little place an’ live on the fatta the lan’.”

— John Steinbeck

288. “This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.”

— John Steinbeck

289. “No one who is young is ever going to be old.”

— John Steinbeck

290. “We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.”

— John Steinbeck

291. “Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches, nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.”

— John Steinbeck

292. “I ought to of shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn’t ought to of let no stranger shoot my dog.”

— John Steinbeck

293. “Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.”

— John Steinbeck

294. “Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make.”

— John Steinbeck

295. “For it is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more. And this is said in disparagement, whereas it is one of the greatest talents the species has and one that has made it superior to animals that are satisfied with what they have.”

— John Steinbeck

296. “The people say that the two seemed to be removed from human experience; that they had gone through pain and had come out on the other side.”

— John Steinbeck

297. “I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught – in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too – in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence.”

— John Steinbeck

298. “I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.”

— John Steinbeck

299. “I’ve lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.”

— John Steinbeck

300. “We can shoot rockets into space but we can’t cure anger or discontent.”

— John Steinbeck