Top 15 John Steinbeck Quotes

I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.

And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.

All great and precious things are lonely.

I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.

It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.

But the Hebrew word, the word timshel — ‘Thou mayest’ — that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’ — it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.

I got you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's
why.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.

All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.

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

When a child first catches adults out — when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just — his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. 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 is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.