4 Posts found for Author: John Steinbeck

The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child’s world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and … [ Read more ]

Author: John Steinbeck | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

Man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness.

Author: John Steinbeck | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one … [ Read more ]

Author: John Steinbeck | Subjects: Concepts, Good & Evil

A child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder, “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?”

I believe that there is one story in the world. […] Humans are caught – in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice … [ Read more ]

Author: John Steinbeck | Source: East of Eden | Subjects: Life & Society, Wisdom