Gertrude Stein Quotes

Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.

Nobody knows what I am trying to do but I do and I know when I succeed.

Money is always there but the pockets change.

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.

Nothing is more interesting than that something that you eat.

This joy you feel is life.

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

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

it is a surprising thing that the largest city in the world should have a population as gentle and pleasant and intimate and considerate and comforting as a little bit of a place where everybody knows everybody and everything, but astonishing or not it is perfectly true and the inhabitants of New York are just like that, and they are like that and this thing is a delightful, natural and gentle and sweet and comforting thing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is the first of the last generation.

There is a difference between twenty-nine and thirty. When you are twenty-nine it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty it can be the end of everything.

It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.

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

An audience is pleasant if you have it, it is flattering and flattering is agreeable always, but if you have an audience the being an audience is their business, they are the audience you are the writer, let each attend to their own business.

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

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

I was somewhat drunk with what I had done. And I am always one to prefer being sober.

The kind of loving women and men have in them and the ways it comes out from them makes for them the bottom nature in them, gives to them their kind of thinking, makes the character they have all their living in them, makes them then their kind of women and men and there are always many millions made of each kind of them.

I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free.

If fishes were wishes the ocean would be all of our desire.

There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. Everybody now-a-days is a father, there is father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and father Trotsky and father Blum and father Franco is just commencing now and there are ever so many more ready to be one. Fathers are depressing. England is the only country now that has not got one and so they are more cheerful there than anywhere. It is a long time now that they have not had any fathering and so their cheerfulness is increasing.

I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.

Melanctha Herbert was always losing what she had in all the things she saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was not leaving others. Melanctha Herbert always loved too hard and much too often. She was always full with mystery and subtle movements and denials and vague distrusts and complicated disillusions. Then Melanctha would be sudden and impulsive and unbounded in some faith, and then she would suffer and be strong in her repression. Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble.

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

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

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

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

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.

More and more I like to take a train. I understand why the French prefer it to automobiling it is so much more sociable, and of course these days so much more of an adventure, and the irregularity of its regularity is fascinating.

Even the propagandists on the radio find it very difficult to really say let alone believe that the world will be a happy place, of love and peace and plenty, and that the lion will lie down with the lamb and everybody will believe anybody.

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.

... when there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war.

Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates.

Human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the Reality and interested in telling about it.

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

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

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

It is very easy to love alone.

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

I wish that I was where I am.

I often think how celebrated I am. / It is difficult not to think how celebrated I am. / And if I think how celebrated I am / They know who know that I am new / That is I knew I know how celebrated I am / And after all it astonishes even me.

A conversation in English in Finnish and in French can not be held at the same time nor with indifference ever or after a time.

there is art and there is official art, there always has been and there always will be.

Near a war is always not very near.

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.

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.