Gertrude Stein Quotes

255 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Gertrude Stein
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.

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

Gertrude Stein
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.

Gertrude Stein
A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it and to me for many years... the use of them was positively degrading.

Gertrude Stein
Some men and women are inquisitive about everything, they are always asking, if they see any one with anything they ask what is that thing, what is it you are carrying, what are you going to be doing with that thing, why have you that thing, where did you get that thing, how long will you have that thing, there are very many men and women who want to know about anything about everything.

Gertrude Stein
Once upon a time the world was round, and you could go on it around and around.

Gertrude Stein
The funny part of it all is that relatively few people seem to go crazy, relatively few even a little crazy or even a little weird, relatively few, and those few because they have nothing to do that is to say they have nothing to do or they do not do anything that has anything to do with the war only with food and cold and little things like that.

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

Gertrude Stein
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.

Gertrude Stein
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.

Gertrude Stein
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.

Gertrude Stein
There are of course people who are more important than others in that they have more importance in the world but this is not essential and it ceases to be. I have no sense of difference in this respect because every human being comprises the combination form.

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

Gertrude Stein
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.

Gertrude Stein
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.

Gertrude Stein
French people do like good fighting, they like it better than anything.

Gertrude Stein
The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.

Gertrude Stein
Star-light, what is star-light, star-light is a little light that is not always mentioned with the sun, it is mentioned with the moon and the sun, it is mixed up with the rest of the time.

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

Gertrude Stein
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.

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

Gertrude Stein
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.

Gertrude Stein
Family living can go on existing. Very many are
remembering this thing are remembering that family
living living can go on existing. Very many are quite
certain that family living can go on existing. Very
many are remembering that they are quite certain that
family living can go on existing.

Gertrude Stein
One thing is certain the only thing that makes you younger or older is that nothing can happen that is different from what you expected and when that happens and it mostly does happen everything is different from what you expected then there is no difference between
being younger or older.

Gertrude Stein
The times are so peculiar now, so mediaeval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth.

Gertrude Stein
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.

Gertrude Stein
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.

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

Gertrude Stein