Gertrude Stein Quotes

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.

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

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.

But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, 'How can I combine career and family?'

Patriarchal Poetry makes mistakes.

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

It is very natural that every one who makes anything inside themselves that is makes it entirely out of what is in them does naturally have to have two civilizations. They have to have the civilization that makes them and the civilization that has nothing to do with them.

I like familiarity. In me it does not bring contempt-only more familiarity.

I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged.

When moneys in a purse in my own pocket / It means wealth.

The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.

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.

As there was never any question there was never any answer.

The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

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

you are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always very well taken care of if you come from Iowa.

There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.

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

I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognising that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school.

There is no there there.

I don't envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not.

Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous

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

Asparagus in a lean in a lean is to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet

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

The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant sees it.

No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.

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

I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.

One cannot come back too often to the question what is knowledge and to the answer knowledge is what one knows.... Knowledge is the thing you know and how can you know more than you do know.

We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don't know that men can do what women can do. That's absolutely crucial. We can't go on doing two jobs.

Remarks are not literature.

. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.

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.

It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.

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 had always been so much taken with the way all English people I knew always were going to see their lawyer. Even if they have no income and do not earn anything they always have a lawyer.

There is something in this native land business and you cannot get away from it, in peace time you do not seem to notice it much particularly when you live in foreign parts but when there is a war and you are all alone and completely cut off from knowing about your country well then there it is, your native land is your native land, it certainly is.

More and more I am certain that the only difference between man and animals is that men can count and animals cannot and if they count they mostly do count money.

Romance is everything.

If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.

A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.

Men cannot count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so.

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

I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace ... By suppressing Jews ... he was ending struggle in Germany.

Argument is to me the air I breathe.

If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.