John Steinbeck
Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don't talk back.Collection: Friendship
If you want to destroy a nation, give it too much - make it greedy, miserable and sick.Collection: Simple
People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments.Collection: People
And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.Collection: Inspiring
There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.Collection: Kindness
If you understand each other you will be kind to each other.Collection: Understanding Love
If you find yourself in a fair fight, your tactics suck.Collection: Military
Anything that just costs money is cheap.Collection: Money
I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.Collection: Depression
I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.Collection: Being Strong
Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.Collection: Love
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. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.Collection: Inspirational
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself.Collection: Dream
How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past?Collection: Past
With all our horrors and faults, somewhere in us there is a shining.Collection: Shining
Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain.Collection: Pain
Socialism is just another form of religion, and thus delusional.Collection: Socialism
Intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over.Collection: Fate
American married life is the doormat to the whorehouse.Collection: Marriage
We can shoot rockets into space but we can't cure anger or discontent.Collection: Space
Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.Collection: Teacher
Sometimes, a lie is told in kindness. I don't believe it ever works kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost.Collection: Pain
I know three things will never be believed - the true, the probable, and the logicalCollection: Three
Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.Collection: Thinking
Perhaps the less we have, the more we are required to brag.Collection: Bragging
And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.Collection: Women
People like you to be something, preferably what they are.Collection: People
You're bound to get idears if you go thinkin' about stuffCollection: Stuff
You know most people live ninety per cent in the past, seven per cent in the present, and that only leaves them three per cent for the future.Collection: Past
I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.Collection: War
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.Collection: Men
The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.Collection: Eye
There's a responsibility in being a person. It's more than just taking up space where air would be.Collection: Responsibility
There's nothing in the world like that first taste of beer.Collection: Beer
An answer is invariably the parent of a whole family of new questions.Collection: Parent
To finish is sadness to a writer — a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.Collection: Inspiring
Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.Collection: Loneliness
The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.Collection: Men
The utter insanity of living in a place like this doesn't occur to the 9,000,000 people who inhabit New York. Except for visits I think I shall not be here any more as a resident.Collection: New York
We think of strangers as stronger and better than we are.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Maturity
When you know a friend is there you do not go to see him. Then he's gone and you blast your conscience to shreds that you did not see him.Collection: Gone
How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration)Collection: Communication
With a few exceptions people don't want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.Collection: Luxury
Many are the stories I have heard about myself. I have mistresses I have never met. When I hear that I am a sodomist and a zoophalist then I shall know that I have reached the high point of fame, but I suppose I can hardly expect such exaltation for many years.Collection: Years
For it is my opinion that we enclose and celebrate the freaks of our nation and our civilization. Yellowstone National Park is no more representative of America than is Disneyland.Collection: Yellowstone
Liza poured thick batter from a pitcher onto a soapstone griddle. The hot cakes rose like little hassocks, and small volcanoes formed and erupted on them until they were ready to be turned. A cheerful brown, they were, with tracings of darker brown. And the kitchen was full of the good sweet smell of them.Collection: Sweet
When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything--before it is all gone.Collection: Thinking