Gertrude Stein Quotes

255 Sourced Quotes

You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.

Gertrude Stein
It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.

Gertrude Stein
There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.

Gertrude Stein
I dislike it when instead of saying Jew they say Hebrew or Israelite, or Semite, I do not like it and why should a Negro want to be called colored. Why should we want to lose being a Negro... I have stated that a noun to me is a stupid thing, if you know a thing and its name why bother about it but you have to know its name to talk about it. Well its name is Negro if it is a Negro and Jew if it is a Jew and both of them are nice strong names and so let us keep them.

Gertrude Stein
Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.

Gertrude Stein
Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious and they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.

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

Gertrude Stein
Let me listen to me and not to them
May I be very well and happy
May I be whichever they can thrive
Or just may they not.
They do not think not only only
But always with prefer
And therefore I like what is mine
For which not only willing but willingly
Because which it matters. They find it one in union.
In union there is strength.

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

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
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