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The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.

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
Probability
Study
Lines
History
Doe
May
Endow
Indicate
Prophecy

More quotes by John Steinbeck

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It isn't like the rest of the country - it is like a nation itself - more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.
John Steinbeck
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He drank too much when he could get it, ate too much when it was there, talked too much all the time.
John Steinbeck
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A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?
John Steinbeck
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A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory
John Steinbeck
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He learned that when people are very poor they still have something to give and the impulse to give it.
John Steinbeck
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Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother.
John Steinbeck
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We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way.
John Steinbeck
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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
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Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.
John Steinbeck
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So much there is to see, but our morning eyes describe a different world than do our afternoon eyes, and surely our wearied evening eyes can report only a weary evening world.
John Steinbeck
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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
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I had been practicing for the Depression a long time. I wasn't involved with loss. I didn't have money to lose, but in common with millions I did dislike hunger and cold.
John Steinbeck
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...Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.
John Steinbeck
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You got a God. Don't make no difference if you don' know what he looks like.
John Steinbeck
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A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool.
John Steinbeck
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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.
John Steinbeck
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It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?
John Steinbeck
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I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails.
John Steinbeck
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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.
John Steinbeck
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The story [Henny-Penny] has the best opening in all literature-The sky is falling, cried Henny-Penny, and a piece of it fell on my tail.
John Steinbeck