Quotes from John Steinbeck

An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion.

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

Can you honestly love a dishonest thing?

People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.

Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.

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

it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.

You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?

Perhaps it takes courage to raise children..

and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?

You know how advice is - you only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyways.

I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

The quality of owning freezes you forever in I, and cuts you off forever from the we.

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.

You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuff

Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.

No one who is young is ever going to be old.

We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.

Men really do need sea-monsters in their personal oceans

Don't make everyone know about your sadness.

And 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.

Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother.