Gertrude Stein Quotes

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

Too few is as many as too many.

If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.

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

I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.

Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.

each generation has something different at which they are all looking.

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.

There is no such thing as being good to your wife.

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.

Dogs are dogs, you sometimes think that they are not but they are. And they always are here there and everywhere.

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

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.

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.

You have to know what you want to get it.

It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.

The thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe.

... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.

Animals in different countries have different expressions just as the people in different countries differ in expression.

There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.

It is so friendly so simply friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occurring not a shock.

The difference between saints, forget-me-nots, and mountains, have to, have to, have to at a time.

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

Don't write about what you don't know even if you don't know it.

Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.

there is no pleasure so sweet as the pleasure of spending money but the pleasure of writing is longer. There is no denying that.

The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

Governing is occupying but not interesting, governments are occupying but not interesting.

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 sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.

This is the real thing of disillusion that no one, not any one really is believing, seeing, understanding, thinking anything as you are thinking, believing, seeing, understanding such a thing.

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

Do not forget birthdays. This is in no way a propaganda for a larger population.

Nature is not natural and that is natural enough.

There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.

If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.

There is no reason why a king should be rich or a rich man should be a king, no reason at all.

Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.

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

it is a peaceful thing to be one succeeding.

The subject matter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of art is to make life better.

Very likely education does not make very much difference.

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

"Native" always means people who belong someplace else, because they had once belonged somewhere. That shows that the white race does not really think they belong anywhere, because they think of everybody else as native.

there are many ways of eating, for some eating is living for some eating is dying, for some thinking about ways of eating gives to them the feeling that they have it in them to be alive and to be going on living, to some to think about eating makes them know that death is always waiting that dying is in them.

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.