Quote

Intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over.

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
Fate
Takes
Else
Enough
Something
Good
Intentions
Intention
Luck

More quotes by John Steinbeck

Image
Out of all this struggle a good thing is going to grow. That makes it worthwhile.
John Steinbeck
Image
The dairy man had a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he must have had some training in philosophy. He liked what he was doing and he didn't want to be somewhere else - one of the few contented people I met in my whole journey.
John Steinbeck
Image
..it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.
John Steinbeck
Image
I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.
John Steinbeck
Image
It must be a hard thing to kill a man you don't know and don't hate.
John Steinbeck
Image
You're buying years of work, toil in the sun you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.
John Steinbeck
Image
The lies we tell about our duty and our purposes, the meaningless words of science and philosophy, are walls that topple before a bewildered little ‘why’.
John Steinbeck
Image
The last clear definite function of men—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man.
John Steinbeck
Image
I don’t mind getting smacked on the chin. I just don’t want to get nibbled to death. There’s a difference.
John Steinbeck
Image
Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.
John Steinbeck
Image
I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.
John Steinbeck
Image
I guess I'm trying to say, Grab anything that goes by. It may not come around again.
John Steinbeck
Image
I've always tried out my material on my dogs first. Years ago, when my red setter chewed up the manuscript of 'Of Mice and Men,' I said at the time that the dog must have been an excellent literary critic.
John Steinbeck
Image
The impulse of the American woman to geld her husband and castrate her sons is very strong.
John Steinbeck
Image
And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
John Steinbeck
Image
Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the Bastard Time.
John Steinbeck
Image
Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
John Steinbeck
Image
Pictures... are also opinions... [they] set down what the camera operator sees and he sees what he wants to see and what he loves and hates and pities and is proud of.
John Steinbeck
Image
Trips to fairly unknown regions should be made twice once to make mistakes and once to correct them.
John Steinbeck
Image
There are two kinds of people in the world, observers and non-observers.
John Steinbeck