Gertrude Stein Quotes & Sayings

#1. I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.

Gertrude Stein

#2. When is there some discharge when. There never is.

Gertrude Stein

#3. This joy you feel is life.

Gertrude Stein

#4. I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich.

Gertrude Stein

#5. Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it's something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup

Gertrude Stein

#6. Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.

Gertrude Stein

#7. A diary means yes indeed.

Gertrude Stein

#8. Too few is as many as too many.

Gertrude Stein

#9. It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

Gertrude Stein

#10. ...I have gone on beginning...

Gertrude Stein

#11. America is my country, and Paris is my home town.

Gertrude Stein

#12. What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?

Gertrude Stein

#13. A saint is one to be for two when three and you make five and two and cover. A at most. Saint saint a saint.

Gertrude Stein

#14. Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.

Gertrude Stein

#15. The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

Gertrude Stein

#16. Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

#18. If anything is a surprise then there is not much difference between older and younger because the only thing that does make anybody older is that they cannot be surprised.

Gertrude Stein

#19. In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.

Gertrude Stein

#20. There never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War.

Gertrude Stein

#21. I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.

Gertrude Stein

#22. There is no reason why a king should be rich or a rich man should be a king, no reason at all.

Gertrude Stein

#23. What is the use of being a little boy if you are growing up to be a man.

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

#25. Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.

Gertrude Stein

#26. The head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything.

Gertrude Stein

#27. Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.

Gertrude Stein

#28. You have to know what you want to get it.

Gertrude Stein

#29. If you are a thinker, you will change the language. You will not use words the way others do.

Gertrude Stein

#30. Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there they were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals. That is the way it was. And everybody dogs cats sheep rabbits and lizards and children all wanted to tell ... all about themselves.

Gertrude Stein

#31. The difference between saints, forget-me-nots, and mountains, have to, have to, have to at a time.

Gertrude Stein

#32. There are the two sides to a Frenchman, logic and fashion and that is the reason why French people are exciting and peaceful. Logic and fashion.

Gertrude Stein

#33. It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

#35. Since it could be done what was the use of doing it, and anyway you always have to stop doing something sometime.

Gertrude Stein

#36. I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.

Gertrude Stein

#37. The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

Gertrude Stein

#38. 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.

Gertrude Stein

#39. An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.

Gertrude Stein

#40. 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.

Gertrude Stein

#41. Replacing a casual aquaintance with an ordinary daughter does not make a son.

Gertrude Stein

#42. A bag which was left and not only taken but turned away was not found. The place was shown to be very like the last time. A piece was not exchanged, not a bit of it, a piece was left over. The rest was mismanaged.

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

#44. 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

#45. Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Gertrude Stein

#46. Forensics is eloquence and reduction.

Gertrude Stein

#47. More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.

Gertrude Stein

#48. Men ... are so conservative, so selfish, so boresome, and ... they are so ugly, and ... they are
gullible, anybody can convince them.

Gertrude Stein

#49. 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

#50. The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.

Gertrude Stein

#51. How I wish I were able to say what I think ...

Gertrude Stein

#52. Spaniards and Americans are not like Europeans, they are not like Orientals, they have something in common, that is they do not need religion or mysticism not to believe in reality as all the world knows it, not even when they see it.

Gertrude Stein

#53. Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

Gertrude Stein

#54. If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.

Gertrude Stein

#55. Always it comes very slowly the completed understanding of it, the repeating each one does to tell it the whole history of the being in each one, always now I hear it. Always now slowly I
understand it.

Gertrude Stein

#56. 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

#57. When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream.

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

#59. She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.

Gertrude Stein

#60. Wake a question. Eat an instant, answer

Gertrude Stein

#61. A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.
(on Ezra Pound)

Gertrude Stein

#62. Let me listen to me and not to them.

Gertrude Stein

#63. I wish to remain to remember that stanzas go on

Gertrude Stein

#64. What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

Gertrude Stein

#65. If you can do it then why do it?

Gertrude Stein

#66. Honesty is a selfish virtue. Yes I am honest enough.

Gertrude Stein

#67. The artist works by locating the world in himself

Gertrude Stein

#68. If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that has so much stretched out.

Gertrude Stein

#69. 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

#70. 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.

Gertrude Stein

#71. You attract what you need like a lover

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

#74. There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.

Gertrude Stein

#75. What good are roots if you can't take them with you

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

#77. To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.

Gertrude Stein

#78. Some out of their own virtue make a god who sometimes later is a nuisance to them, a terror perhaps to them, a difficult thing to be forgetting.

Gertrude Stein

#79. 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

#80. I am I because my little dog knows me.

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

#82. Men and girls, men and girls: Artificial swine and pearls.

Gertrude Stein

#83. There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.

Gertrude Stein

#84. 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.

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

#87. The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one
forget eternity and the fear of death.

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

#89. Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore that name. Are they all alike. I think so.

Gertrude Stein

#90. There are so many ways of earning a living and most of them are failures.

Gertrude Stein

#91. Argument is to me the air I breathe.

Gertrude Stein

#92. Adventure is making the distant approach nearer
but romance is having what is where it is which is not
where you are stay where it is.

Gertrude Stein

#93. 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 also are creating their own time refuse to accept.

Gertrude Stein