Quote

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

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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
Science
Meaningless
Tell
Lies
Littles
Wall
Little
Duty
Philosophy
Topple
Lying
Bewildered
Purpose
Purposes
Words
Walls

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A question is a trap and an answer is your foot in it.
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And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.
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The great concepts of oneness and of majestic order seem always to be born in the desert.
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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.
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Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners ... California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart ... The American identity is an exact and provable thing.
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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.
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When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.
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And their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels.
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A man on a horse is spiritually, as well as physically, bigger then a man on foot.
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Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.
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Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself.
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