Quotes by John Steinbeck

“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”

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

“As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.”

“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.”

“I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction”

“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.”

“A book is like a man / clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.”

“There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I dont mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, thats the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.”

“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.”

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. In other words, I dont improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.”

“I believe that love cannot be bought except with love”

“If youre in trouble, or hurt or need -- go to the poor people. Theyre the only ones thatll help -- the only ones.”

“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 hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything.”

“This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.”

“Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.”

“A boy becomes a man when a man is needed.”