John Steinbeck Men Quotations

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

It has always been my private conviction that any man who puts his intelligence up against a fish and loses had it coming.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

It always seemed strange to me that the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, aquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and selfinterest are the traits of sucess. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second.

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

Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans

Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create - this is man.

I've always tried out my material on my dogs first. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of 'Of Mice and Men,' I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.

Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk.

A man without words is a man without thought.

A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?

How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other.

The trash and litter of nature disappears into the ground with the passing of each year, but man's litter has more permanence.

Some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.

Man has a choice and it's a choice that makes him a man.

And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.

I know this... a man got to do what he got to do.

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.

Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.

A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.

A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice, some paint it with their own delight. A story must have some points of contact with the reader to make him feel at home in it. Only then can he accept wonders.

The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.

One man was so mad at me that he ended his letter Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.

The camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart...

Yes, you should talk," he said. "Sometimes a sad man can talk the sadness right out through his mouth. Sometimes a killin' man can talk the murder right out of his mouth.

Look now -- in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil thing not to be countenanced. Any man who kills must be destroyed because this is a great sin, maybe the worst we know. And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "use it well, use it wisely." We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind or classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of your early training.

Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.

A man on a horse is spiritually, as well as physically, bigger then a man on foot.

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

Give me a used Bible and I will, I think, be able to tell you about a man by the places that are edged with the dirt of seeking fingers.

Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.

All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.

Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. While there remains even a plaintive memory, a person cannot be cut off, dead. And he thought, “It’s a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man’s life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness.

There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.

In business and in politics a man must carve and maul his way through men to get to be King of the Mountain. Once there, he can be great and kind-but he must get there first.

When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influences and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.

Such is the prestige of the Nobel Award and of this place where I stand that I am impelled, not to speak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession and in the great and good men who have practised it through the ages.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going.

The last clear definite function of men—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man.

For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.

It was deeply a part of Lee's kindness and understanding that man's right to kill himself is inviolable, but sometimes a friend can make it unnecessary

If a man ordered a beer milkshake he'd better do it in a town where he wasn't known.

I am a little man and this is a little town, but there must be a spark in little men that can burst into flame.

A man with a beard was always a little suspect anyway. You couldn't say you wore a beard because you liked a beard. People didn't like you for telling the truth. You had to say you had a scar so you couldn't shave.

Some men hunger so much for love that they lose everything that is loveable about them.

What good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world - temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers. Sometimes he may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity with moral ethics.

Only let a man say that he will do something and a whole mechanism goes to work to stop him.

It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don't know and don't hate.

One can't be happy as I have been for very long. There's a law against it. I have worked hard and enjoyed my work and it is the punishment of man to hate his work. Sooner or later I will have work that I hate.

The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.

I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.

There is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him.

A boy becomes a man when a man is needed

I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It's bad theater as well as bad living.

A woman holds dreadful power over a man who is in love with her but she should realize that the quality and force of his love is the index of his potential contempt and hatred.

There is no term comparable to green thumbs to apply to such a mechanic, but there should be. For there are men who can look, listen, tap, make an adjustment, and a machine works.

A boy gets to be a man when a man is needed. Remember this thing. I have known boys forty years old because there was no need for a man:

Some men ease themselves like setting hens into the nest of death.

Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man.

That man who is more then his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis.

There's nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can't see or hear or touch a man, it's best to let him go.

The misery stayed, not thought about but aching away, and sometimes I would have to ask myself, Why do I ache? Men can get used to anything, but it takes time.

Man has become our greatest hazard, and our only hope.

If I was alone I could live so easy. I could go get a job an' work, an' no trouble.

The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and shelled for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In the back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes... In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so.

I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.

Then the hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels. They gathered mountains and valleys, rivers and whole horizons, the way a man might now gain tittle to building lots.

But a man needs company.

A man who gets few letters does not open one lightly.

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child.

The warfare between the unaroused male and female is constant and ferocious. Each blames the other for his loss of soul.

I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent.

... a man is a very important thing-maybe more important than a star.

Critics are the eunuchs of literature. They stand by in envious awe while the whole man and his partner demonstrate the art of living.

I think bullfights are for men who aren't very brave and wish they were.

In my heart there may be doubt that I deserve the Nobel award over other men of letters whom I hold in respect and reverence, but there is no question of my pleasure and pride in having it for myself.

It is strange how a man believes he can think better in a special place. I have such a place, have always had it, but I know it isn't thinking I do there, but feeling and experiencing and remembering. It's a safety place. Everyone must have one, although I never heard a man tell of it.

It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me, that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to man.

Show me the man who isn't interested in discussing himself.

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved.

War ... a reversal of the rules where a man is permitted to kill all the humans he can.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man.

Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men.

But you must give him some sign, some sign that you love him... or he'll never be a man. All his life he'll feel guilty and alone unless you release him.

The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads.

Yes, you will. And I will warn you now that not their blood but your suspicion might build evil in them. They will be what you expect of them…I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb." "You can’t make a race horse of a pig." "No," said Samuel, "but you can make a very fast pig.

And this you can know- fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.

The ways of sin are curious . . . I guess if a man had to shuck off everything he had, inside and out, he'd manage to hide a few little sins somewhere for his own discomfort. They're the last things we'll give up.

Men all do about the same thing when they wake up.

To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.

But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There's no godliness there.

The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.

What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.

This was an evil beyond thinking. The killing of a man was not so evil as the killing of a boat. For a boat does not have sons, and a boat cannot protect itself, and a wounded boat does not heal.

I think there must have been some other girl printed somewhere in his heart, for he was a man of love and his wife was not a woman to show her feelings.