Quotes from East of Eden — John Steinbeck
1902–1968 United States
← All quotes by John Steinbeck
7 quotes
Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone.
East of Eden (1952)
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man.
East of Eden (1952)
Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
East of Eden (1952)
If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
East of Eden (1952)
Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished…
East of Eden (1952)
When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God.
East of Eden (1952)
I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for it is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
East of Eden (1952)