QuotesCosmos
Introduction
“

Some people there are who, being grown, forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child. An adult is rarely successful in the undertaking — the reduction of experience to a set of symbols. For a thousand thousand years these humans have existed and they have only learned this trick — this magic — in the final ten thousand of the thousand thousand.

— John Steinbeck

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Some people there are who, being grown, forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child. An adult is rarely successful in the undertaking — the reduction of experience to a set of symbols. For a thousand thousand years these humans have existed and they have only learned this trick — this magic — in the final ten thousand of the thousand thousand." in the context of "Introduction" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Source: Wikiquote: "John Steinbeck" (Quotes, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app

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#John Steinbeck#thousand#undertaking#undertakes#successful#experience#reduction#horrible#learning#greatest#perhaps#symbols
John Steinbeck

About John Steinbeck

John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (27 February 1902 – 20 December 1968) was an American writer. A recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, his works include the novella Of Mice and Men (1937) and the novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1940), both of which examine the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Great Depression.