John Steinbeck

• All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.
• 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 to the world.
• Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.
• It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.
• And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.
• I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.
• When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people.
• I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
• No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
• Anything that just costs money is cheap.
• 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.
• There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.
• A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.
• Don't worry about losing. If it is right, it happens - The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
• I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
• 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.