Gertrude Stein Quotes

255 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Gertrude Stein
Propaganda is not French, it is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilised is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business.

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

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

Gertrude Stein
They were regular in being gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, they learned many little things that are things in being gay, they were gay every day, they were regular, they were gay, they were gay the same length of time every day, they were gay, they were quite regularly gay.

Gertrude Stein
It is nice in France they adapt themselves to everything slowly they change completely but all the time they know that they are as they were.

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

Gertrude Stein
Suddenly it was all different, what I did had a value that made people ready to pay, up to that time everything I did had a value because nobody was ready to pay. It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay for you and when your public knows you and does want to pay for you, you are not the same you.

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

Gertrude Stein
It is very difficult in quarreling to be certain in either one what the other one is remembering. It is very often astonishing to each one quarreling to find out what the other one was remembering for quarreling. Mostly in quarreling not any one is finding out what the other one is remembering for quarreling, what the other one is remembering from quarreling.

Gertrude Stein
I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.

Gertrude Stein
It is very funny about money. The thing that differentiates man from animals is money. All animals have the same emotions and the same ways as men. Anybody who has lots of animals around knows that. But the thing no animal can do is count, and the thing no animal can know is money.

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

Gertrude Stein
I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will.

Gertrude Stein
That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back.

Gertrude Stein
Superstition is believing that something means anything and that anything means something and that each thing means a particular thing and will mean a particular thing is coming. Oh yes it does.

Gertrude Stein
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.

Gertrude Stein
Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.

Gertrude Stein
Cooking like everything else in France is logic and fashion.

Gertrude Stein
Remarks are not literature [said to Hemingway].

Gertrude Stein
Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.

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

Gertrude Stein
Now they can do the radio in so many languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one, anybody can hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing, so what is the use of conquering.

Gertrude Stein