Top 500 John Steinbeck Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “The clouds appeared and went away, and in a while they did not try anymore.”

— John Steinbeck

352. “Trouble with mice is you always kill ’em.”

— John Steinbeck

353. “Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the leaves. The shade climbed up the hills toward the top. On the sand banks the rabbits sat as quietly as little gray, sculptured stones.”

— John Steinbeck

354. “A dog is a bond between strangers.”

— John Steinbeck

355. “I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”

— John Steinbeck

356. “A plan is a real thing, and things projected are experienced. A plan once made and visualized becomes reality along with other realities – never to be destroyed but easily to be attacked.”

— John Steinbeck

357. “There was the hills, an’ there was me, an’ we wasn’t separate no more. We was one thing. An’ that one thing was holy.”

— John Steinbeck

358. “And the people listened, and their faces were quiet with listening. The story tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great words because the tales were great, and the listeners became great through them.”

— John Steinbeck

359. “And Tom brought him chicken soup until he wanted to kill him. The lore has not died out of the world, and you will still find people who believe that soup will cure any hurt or illness and is no bad thing to have for the funeral either.”

— John Steinbeck

360. “Books ain’t no good. A guy needs somebody – to be near him.” He whined, “A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody. Don’t make no difference who the guy is, long’s he’s with you. I tell ya,” he cried, “I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”

— John Steinbeck

361. “When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.”

— John Steinbeck

362. “You’re buying years of work, toil in the sun; you’re buying a sorrow that can’t talk.”

— John Steinbeck

363. “Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.”

— John Steinbeck

364. “Doc tips his hat to dogs as he drives by and the dogs look up and smile at him.”

— John Steinbeck

365. “He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories. -Hazel, Cannery Row.”

— John Steinbeck

366. “Now farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, although they did not know it. They imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the business men said. They don’t need much.”

— John Steinbeck

367. “The bank – the monster has to have profits all the time. It can’t wait. It’ll die. No, taxes go on. When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size.”

— John Steinbeck

368. “And I here make a rule-a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting-only the deeply personal and familiar.”

— John Steinbeck

369. “Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one. If I go ahead on all of ’em, it’s too much.”

— John Steinbeck

370. “I don’t very much believe in blood,” said Samuel. “I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.” “You can’t make a race horse of a pig.” “No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”

— John Steinbeck

371. “The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.”

— John Steinbeck

372. “He was born in Bercy on the outskirts of Paris and trained in France, and while he knows a little Poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down.”

— John Steinbeck

373. “Only God sees the sparrow fall, but even God doesn’t do anything about it.”

— John Steinbeck

374. “Lord, how the day passes! It’s like a life – so quickly when we don’t watch it and so slowly when we do.”

— John Steinbeck

375. “The people don’t like to be conquered, sir, and so they will not be. 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. You will find that is so, sir.”

— John Steinbeck

376. “I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”

— John Steinbeck

377. “A fallow field is a sin.”

— John Steinbeck

378. “Some men ease themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.”

— John Steinbeck

379. “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

380. “On all levels American society is rigged. I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis.”

— John Steinbeck

381. “And of course they were descended from the ancient kings of Ireland, as every Irishman is.”

— John Steinbeck

382. “The Mexican War was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murders settled on us, the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible.”

— John Steinbeck

383. “It isn’t like the rest of the country – it is like a nation itself – more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.”

— John Steinbeck

384. “Love and fighting, and a little wine. Then you are always young, always happy.”

— John Steinbeck

385. “Don’t ever ask directions of a Maine native,” I was told. “Why ever not?” “Somehow we think it is funny to misdirect people and we don’t smile when we do it, but we laugh inwardly. It is our nature.” I wonder if that is true. I could never test it, because through my own efforts I am lost most of the time without any help from anyone.”

— John Steinbeck

386. “No one could call him a liar. And this was mainly because the lie was in his head, and any truth coming from his mouth carried the color of the lie.”

— John Steinbeck

387. “The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong.”

— John Steinbeck

388. “I hope you know what you’re doing when you issue me a license to talk. I’ve heard two ways of looking at it. One says the silent man is the wise man and the other that a man without words is a man without thought. Naturally I favor the second.”

— John Steinbeck

389. “I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails.”

— John Steinbeck

390. “When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco “the City”. Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive work is “city”. Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital. p197.”

— John Steinbeck

391. “Ah, the prayers of the millions, how they must fight and destroy each other on their way to the throne of God.”

— John Steinbeck

392. “It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times.”

— John Steinbeck

393. “To hell with that rotten century! Let’s get it over and the door closed shut on it! Let’s close it like a book and go on reading! New chapter, new life. A man will have clean hands once we get the lid slammed shut on that stinking century. It’s a fair thing ahead. There’s no rot on this clean new hundred years. It’s not stacked, and any bastard who deals seconds from this new deck of years – why, we’ll crucify him head down over a privy.”

— John Steinbeck

394. “But to find where you are going, you must know where you are, and I didn’t.”

— John Steinbeck

395. “There is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him.”

— John Steinbeck

396. “Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans.”

— John Steinbeck

397. “Change was everywhere. People were gone, or changed, and that was almost like being gone.”

— John Steinbeck

398. “For there are two possible reactions to social ostracism – either a man emerges determined to be better, purer, and kindlier or he goes bad, challenges the world and does even worse things. The last is by far the commonest reaction to stigma.”

— John Steinbeck

399. “Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby those fruits may be eaten.”

— John Steinbeck

400. “It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be loved without satiety.”

— John Steinbeck