1,374 Quotes by John Steinbeck

Somewhere in the world there is a defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.

Men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them.... In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals.... What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals?

Well, a man's mind can't stay in time the way his body does.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the bastard Time.

There's so much talk about justice, injustice, conquest. Our people are invaded, but I don't think they're conquered.

Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working it, dying on it.

Η ζωή δεν μπορεί να κοπεί γρήγορα. Δεν μπορεί κανείς να πεθάνει πριν πεθάνουν όσα έχει καταπιαστεί. Η δράση του είναι η μόνη μαρτυρία της ζωής του. Όσο μένει έστω και μια παραπονιάρικη ανάμνηση, δεν μπορεί ένα πρόσωπο ν' αποκοπεί, να πεθάνει.

Relationship Time to Aloneness. And I remember about that. Having a companion fixes you in time and that the present, but when the quality of aloneness settles down, past, present, and future all flow together. A memory, a present event, and a forecast all equally present.

In that day an educated rich man was acceptable. He might send his sons to college without comment, might wear a vest and white shirt and tie in the daytime of a weekday, might wear gloves and keep his nails clean. And since the lives and practices of rich men were mysterious, who knows what they could use or not use? But a poor man––what need had he for poetry or for painting or for music not fit for singing or dancing?