Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “It’s a thing to see when a boy comes home. It’s a thing to see.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

305. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

314. “There is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter.”

— John Steinbeck

315. “In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted shortcuts to love... We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil.”

— John Steinbeck

316. “In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try to live so that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”

— John Steinbeck

317. “I am a little man and this is a little town, but there must be a spark in little men that can burst into flame.”

— John Steinbeck

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

— John Steinbeck

319. “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

320. “Abra was ready ere I called her name. And though I called another, Abra came.”

— John Steinbeck

321. “Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.”

— John Steinbeck

322. “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

323. “You’re going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.”

— John Steinbeck

324. “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

325. “A book is somehow sacred. A dictator can kill and maim people, can sink to any kind of tyranny and only be hated, but when books are burned the ultimate in tyranny has happened. This we cannot forgive.”

— John Steinbeck

326. “Sometimes when she was alone, and she knew she was alone, she permitted her mind to play in a garden, and she smiled.”

— John Steinbeck

327. “A funeral isn’t for the dead. You’ll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival maybe. And besides, you won’t even be there.”

— John Steinbeck

328. “Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place. They come to a ranch an’ work up a stake and then they go inta town and blow their stake, and the first thing you know they’re pound-in’ their tail on some other ranch. They ain’t got nothing to look ahead to.”

— John Steinbeck

329. “It was a day as different from other days as dogs are from cats and both of them from chrysanthemums or tidal waves or scarlet fever.”

— John Steinbeck

330. “My own journey started long before I left, and was over before I returned.”

— John Steinbeck

331. “When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch.”

— John Steinbeck

332. “All Americans believe that they are born fishermen. For a man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother-love or hating moonlight.”

— John Steinbeck

333. “There seemed to be no cure for loneliness save only being alone.”

— John Steinbeck

334. “No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.”

— John Steinbeck

335. “And this is about the way the Salinas Valley was when my grandfather brought his wife and settled in the foothills to the east of King City.”

— John Steinbeck

336. “Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine.”

— John Steinbeck

337. “A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin’ books or thinkin’ or stuff like that. Sometimes he gets thinkin’, an’ he got nothing to tell him what’s so an’ what ain’t so. Maybe if he sees somethin’, he don’t know whether it’s right or not. He can’t turn to some other guy and ast him if he sees it too. He can’t tell. He got nothing to measure by.”

— John Steinbeck

338. “With a few exceptions people don’t want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.”

— John Steinbeck

339. “A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child.”

— John Steinbeck

340. “A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.”

— John Steinbeck

341. “I don’t know what directed his steps toward the Salinas Valley. It was an unlikely place for a man from a green country to come to, but he came about thirty years before the turn of the century and brought with him his tiny Irish wife, a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken. She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.”

— John Steinbeck

342. “Everybody wants a little bit of land, not much. Jus’ som’thin’ that was his. Som’thin’ he could live on and there couldn’t nobody throw him off of it.”

— John Steinbeck

343. “No – the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds. And everything’s holy – everything, even me.”

— John Steinbeck

344. “A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody.”

— John Steinbeck

345. “I’m back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.”

— John Steinbeck

346. “Life could not change the sun or water the desert, so it changed itself.”

— John Steinbeck

347. “It was a morning like other mornings and yet perfect among mornings.”

— John Steinbeck

348. “Yeah,” said George. “I’ll come. But listen, Curley. The poor bastard’s nuts. Don’t shoot ‘im. He di’n’t know what he was doin’.”

— John Steinbeck

349. “And the women sighed with relief, for they knew it was all right – the break had not come; and the break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath.”

— John Steinbeck

350. “For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost- good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies anymore, and you couldn’t trust a gentleman’s word.”

— John Steinbeck