"It has always seemed strange to me...The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."
React to this quote
More by John Steinbeck
See allResonant Thoughts
"The gospel and the first church were never hostile to women nor treated them as minors. … When Christianity became a power or authority, this worked against women. A strange perversion, yet fully unde…"
"Renoir is a great success on the Salon; I think he is 'launched'. All the better! It's a very hard life, being poor."
Explore Further
Related Quotes
"An individual gets away from this type of self-centeredness when he pauses enough to see that no matter wha…"
— Martin Luther King"I'm writing this book because we're all going to die — In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my bro…"
— Jack Kerouac"My father rarely spoke of life before . About prison, he jsut said, "That man is a genius at PR." Castro wo…"
— Gloria Estefan"We are always getting ready to live, but never living."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson"The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close…"
— John F. Kennedy"So my change in diet was really a gradual process. I had cut meat out of my diet and then had a hard time t…"
— David Zabriskie
