Quotes from John Steinbeck

Sectional football games have the glory and the despair of war, and when a Texas team takes the field against a foreign state, it is an army with banners.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

A boy becomes a man when a man is needed

All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not.

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

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.

Every man in a bank hates what the bank does and yet the bank does it.

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.

Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared.[...]It's slow. It rots out your guts.

...men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.