1,374 Quotes by John Steinbeck

It is possible, even probable, to be told a truth about a place, to accept it, to know it and at the same time not to know anything about it.

An answer is invariably the parent of a whole family of new questions.

We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for thy can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

Money is not nice. Money got no friends but more money.

And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "Use it well, use it wisely.

I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.

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 so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from "I" to "we". If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I", and cuts you off forever from the "we".