Quote

There's an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort.

John Steinbeck

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Steinbeck
Age: 66 †
Born: 1902
Born: February 27
Died: 1968
Died: December 20
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Salinas
California
John Ernst Steinbeck
Jr.
John Ernst Steinbeck
John Ernest Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr
Steinbeck
Effort
Nothing
Inactive
Laziness
Confusion
Wanting
Awful
Kindness
Trouble

More quotes by John Steinbeck

Image
Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world
John Steinbeck
Image
You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.
John Steinbeck
Image
When you're huntin' somepin you're a hunter, an' you're strong. Can't nobody beat a hunter. But when you get hunted - that's different. Somepin happens to you. You ain't strong: maybe you're fierce, but you ain't strong. - Muley
John Steinbeck
Image
It seems to me Montana is a great splash of grandeur. The scale is huge but not overpowering. The land is rich with grass and color, and the mountains are the kind I would create if mountains were ever put on my agenda.
John Steinbeck
Image
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.
John Steinbeck
Image
Sir, this is a unique dog. He does not live by tooth or fang. He respects the right of cats to be cats although he doesn't admire them. He turns his steps rather than disturb an earnest caterpillar. His greatest fear is that someone will point out a rabbit and suggest that he chase it. This is a dog of peace and tranquility.
John Steinbeck
Image
Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.
John Steinbeck
Image
Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.
John Steinbeck
Image
I have wondered why is it that some people are less affected and torn by the verities of life and death that others.
John Steinbeck
Image
It's almost impossible to read a fine thing without wanting to do a fine thing.
John Steinbeck
Image
We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God.
John Steinbeck
Image
It occurs to me that just as the Carthaginians hired mercenaries to do their fighting for them, we Americans being in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat.
John Steinbeck
Image
Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.
John Steinbeck
Image
I’m in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection. But with Montana it is love. And it’s difficult to analyze love when you’re in it.
John Steinbeck
Image
The comfortable people in tight houses felt pity at first, and then distaste, and finally hatred for the migrant people.
John Steinbeck
Image
War ... a reversal of the rules where a man is permitted to kill all the humans he can.
John Steinbeck
Image
I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton woool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap.
John Steinbeck
Image
The break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath.
John Steinbeck
Image
The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.
John Steinbeck
Image
Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don't believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.
John Steinbeck