Top 90 Stephen Crane Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Sometimes, the most profound of awakenings come wrapped in the quietest of moments.”

— Stephen Crane

2. “El que puede cambiar sus pensamientos, puede cambiar su destino.”

— Stephen Crane

3. “Mother, whose heart hung humble as a button the bright splendid shroud of your son, Do not weep. War is kind.”

— Stephen Crane

4. “But I like it Because it is bitter, And because it is my heart.”

— Stephen Crane

5. “It was surprising that Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so much devilment.”

— Stephen Crane

6. “A mysterious fraternity born out of smoke and danger of death.”

— Stephen Crane

7. “Perhaps an individual must consider his own death to be the final phenomenon of nature.”

— Stephen Crane

8. “The man had arrived at that stage of drunkenness where affection is felt for the universe.”

— Stephen Crane

9. “The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors.”

— Stephen Crane

10. “It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.”

— Stephen Crane

11. “A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree. This would demonstrate that he was indeed a seer.”

— Stephen Crane

12. “He suddenly lost concern for himself, and forgot to look at a menacing fate. He became not a man but a member. He felt that something of which he was a part – a regiment, an army, a cause, or a country – was in a crisis. He was welded into a common personality which was dominated by a single desire. For some moments he could not flee no more than a little finger can commit a revolution from a hand.”

— Stephen Crane

13. “In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends.”

— Stephen Crane

14. “Doubtless there are other roads.”

— Stephen Crane

15. “Let me into the darkness again.”

— Stephen Crane

16. “It perhaps might be said – if any one dared – that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.”

— Stephen Crane

17. “It was really the intention of the seven mad gods to drown him, despite the abominable injustice of it. For it was certainly an abominable injustice to drown a man who had worked so hard, so hard. The man felt it would be a crime most unnatural. Other people had drowned at sea since galleys swarmed with painted sails, but still –.”

— Stephen Crane

18. “The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.”

— Stephen Crane

19. “Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.”

— Stephen Crane

20. “When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea’s voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.”

— Stephen Crane

21. “Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea.”

— Stephen Crane

22. “And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends.”

— Stephen Crane

23. “A man with a full stomach and the respect of his fellows had no business to scold about anything that he might think to be wrong in the ways of the universe, or even with the ways of society. Let the unfortunates rail; the others may play marbles.”

— Stephen Crane

24. “If I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned, why in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate land and trees?”

— Stephen Crane

25. “When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.”

— Stephen Crane

26. “A MAN FEARED A man feared that he might find an assassin; Another that he might find a victim. One was more wise than the other.”

— Stephen Crane

27. “Every sin is the result of collaboration.”

— Stephen Crane

28. “A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats.”

— Stephen Crane

29. “Tell her this And more, – That the king of the seas Weeps too, old, helpless man. The bustling fates Heap his hands with corpses Until he stands like a child With surplus of toys.”

— Stephen Crane

30. “He did not consider public opinion to be accurate at long range.”

— Stephen Crane

31. “The wind had a voice as it came over the waves, and it was sadder than the end.”

— Stephen Crane

32. “Half of tradition is a lie.”

— Stephen Crane

33. “Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.”

— Stephen Crane

34. “They were going to look at war, the red animal – war, the blood-swollen god. And they were deeply engrossed in this march.”

— Stephen Crane

35. “He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.”

— Stephen Crane

36. “I saw a man pursuing the horizon.”

— Stephen Crane

37. “Through his suffering, he peers into the core of things and sees that the judgment of man is thistle-down in the wind.”

— Stephen Crane

38. “None of them knew the color of the sky.”

— Stephen Crane

39. “At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.”

— Stephen Crane

40. “It is perhaps, plausible that a man in this situation, impressed with the unconcern of the universe, should see the innumerable flaws of his life and have them taste wickedly in his mind and wish for another chance.”

— Stephen Crane

41. “They would twist their bodies for a moment and groan, and sleep the dead sleep once more...”

— Stephen Crane

42. “Two or three angels Came near to the earth. They saw a fat church. Little black streams of people Came and went in continually. And the angels were puzzled To know why the people went thus, And why they stayed so long within.”

— Stephen Crane

43. “This landscape gave him assurance. A fair field holding life. It was the religion of peace. It would die if its timid eyes were compelled to see blood. He conceived Nature to be a woman with a deep aversion to tragedy.”

— Stephen Crane

44. “The word is clear only to the kind who on peak or plain, from dark northern ice-fields to the hot wet jungles, through all wine and want, through lies and unfamiliar truth, dark or light, are governed by the unknown gods, and though each man knows the law, no man may give tongue to it.”

— Stephen Crane

45. “The dead man and the living man exchanged a long look. Then the youth cautiously put one hand behind him and brought it against a tree. Leaning upon this he retreated, step by step, with his face still toward the thing. He feared that if he turned his back the body might spring up and stealthily pursue him.”

— Stephen Crane

46. “Since he had turned his back upon the fight his fears had been wondrously magnified. Death about to thrust him between the shoulder blades was far more dreadful than death about to smite him between the eyes. When he thought of it later, he conceived the impression that it is better to view the appalling than to be merely within hearing.”

— Stephen Crane

47. “Tradition, thou art for suckling children, Thou art the enlivening milk for babes, But no meat for men is in thee.”

— Stephen Crane

48. “In the swirling rain that came at dusk the broad avenue glistened with that deep bluish tint which is so widely condemned when it is put into pictures.”

— Stephen Crane

49. “His face had been twisted into an expression of every agony he had imagined for his friend.”

— Stephen Crane

50. “Once he thought he had concluded that it would be better to get killed directly and end his troubles. Regarding death thus out of the corner of his eye, he conceived it to be nothing but rest, and he was filled with a momentary astonishment that he should have made an extraordinary commotion over the mere matter of getting killed.”

— Stephen Crane