John Steinbeck Life Quotations

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

I've lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate.

It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.

It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routine life, even if you hate it.

A man without words is a man without thought.

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

Lord, how the day passes! It's like a life - so quickly when we don't watch it and so slowly when we do.

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

Only mediocrity escapes criticism.

American married life is the doormat to the whorehouse.

Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world, of all living things.

I have wondered why is it that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death that others.

People do not want advice - they want corroboration.

I think of my life as a kind of music, not always good music but still having form and melody.

He said, "I am a man," and that meant certain things to Juana. It meant that he was half insane and half god.