Gertrude stein quotes

One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

You have to learn to do everything, even to die.

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.

I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

Action and reaction are equal and opposite.

I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.

Coffee is real good when you drink it gives you time to think. It's a lot more than just a drink; it's something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup.

You look ridiculous if you dance You look ridiculous if you don't dance So you might as well dance.

Eating too much meat gives you indigestion and evil thoughts make you eat too much meat.

In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.

Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.

How I wish I were able to say what I think.

Anyone who marries three girls from St Louis hasn't learned much.

We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me why American men think that success is everything when they know that eighty percent of them are not going to succeed more than to just keep going and why if they are not why do they not keep on being interested in the things that interested them when they were college men and why American men different from English men do not get more interesting as they get older.

We are always the same age inside.

I really do know that it can be done and if it can be done why do it...

If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.

This joy you feel is life.

To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.

Is money money or isn't money money. Everybody who earns it and spends it every day in order to live knows that money is money, anybody who votes it to be gathered in as taxes knows money is not money. That is what makes everybody go crazy.... When you earn money and spend money every day anybody can know the difference between a million and three. But when you vote money away there really is not any difference between a million and three.

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.

Forget grammar and think about potatoes

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.

[On Ezra Pound:] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

One must dare to be happy.

A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints In Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything. Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something.

A creator is so completely contemporary that he has the appearance of being ahead of his generation.

It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers' granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?

When you earn it and spend it you do know the difference between three dollars and a million dollars, but when you say it and vote it, it all sounds the same.

It is better to lose and win, than win and be defeated.

Forensics is eloquence and reduction.

In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.

College professors have two bad traits. They are logical and they are easily flattered.

I could never be one of two I could never be two in one as married couples do and can, I am but one all one, one and all one, and so I have never been married to any one.

Whoever said money can't buy happiness didn't know where to shop

Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.

It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living.

In America ... who is to stop congress from spending too much money. They will not stop themselves, that is certain. Everybody has to think about that now. Who is to stop them.

The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one forget eternity and the fear of death.

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

Romance is everything.

Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.

One must either accept some theory or else believe one's own instinct or follow the world's opinion.

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one.

You attract what you need like a lover

It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

Every day is a renewal, every morning the daily miracle. This joy you feel is life.

America is my country and Paris is my hometown.

When you get there, there isn't any there there.

How do you like what you have. This is a question that anybody can ask anybody. Ask it.

The one thing that everybody wants is to be freenot to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free … The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.

You have to know what you want. And if it seems to take you off the track, don't hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry.

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.

Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.

there are the two sides to a Frenchman, logic and fashion and that is the reason why French people are exciting and peaceful. Logic and fashion.

Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.

The artist works by locating the world in himself

One never discusses anything with anybody who can understand one discusses things with people who cannot understand.

The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.

art is the pulse of a nation.

There are two kinds of men and women, those who have in them resisting as their way of winning those who have in them attacking as their way of winning.

Too few is as many as too many.

Art isn't everything. It's just about everything.

The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.

There is no there there.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.

When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.

You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!

Love: the skillful audacity required to share an inner life.

I am I because my little dog knows me.

Silent gratitude isn't very much to anyone.

There is no real reality to a really imagined life any more.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

Money is always there but the pockets change.

What is the use of being a little boy if you are growing up to be a man.

There is no passion more dominant and instinctive in the human spirit than the need of the country to which one belongs.... The time comes when nothing in the world is so important as a breath of one's own particular climate. If it were one's last penny it would be used for that return passage.

Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.

It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business

I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

Mostly every one is needing some one to be one listening to that one being one being one boasting.

Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.

The way to resume is to resume. It is the only way. To resume.

If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.

There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.

There is no beginning to an end / But there is a beginning and an end / To beginning.

It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.

A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.

You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.

Honesty is a selfish virtue. Yes I am honest enough.

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

It is inevitable when one has a great need of something one finds it. What you need you attract like a lover.

To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.

Suppose no one asked a question. What would the answer be?

There are a lot of other things besides nouns.

It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.

A diary means yes indeed.

A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.

There are so many ways of earning a living and most of them are failures.

In America, everybody is, but some are more than others.

The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.

Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore that name. Are they all alike. I think so.

Let me listen to me and not to them.

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

Just before she died she asked, What is the answer? No answer came. She laughed and said, In that case, what is the question? Then she died.

I wish that I was where I am.

Nothing has happened today except kindness.

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.

I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer.

How likely are definitions to be pleasurable.

Any time is the time to make a poem.

Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.