John Steinbeck

United States
27 Feb 1902 // 20 Dec 1968
Writer

Quotes

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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.
If you want to keep a friend, never test him.
Failure is a state of mind. It's like one of those sand traps an ant lion digs. You keep sliding back. Takes one hell of a jump to get out of it.
What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately.
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.
You know how advice is - you only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyways.
People who are most afraid of their dreams convince themselves they don't dream at all.
No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
To be alive at all is to have scars.
It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays