Gertrude Stein Quotes

it is a peaceful thing to be one succeeding.

There is a difference between twenty-nine and thirty. When you are twenty-nine it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty it can be the end of everything.

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

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

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

Perhaps I am not I even if my little dog knows me but anyway I like what I have and now it is today.

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.

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

Every man is the maker of his own fortune

If fishes were wishes the ocean would be all of our desire.

Don't write about what you don't know even if you don't know it.

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. 'Stop!' cried the groaning old man at last, 'Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.

Success is the result achieved when nobody answers.

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.

But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.

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

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.

August is a month when if it is hot weather it is really very hot.

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

Near a war is always not very near.

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

. . . 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.

I think the reason I am important is that I know everything.

I was undone by my Auxiliary; when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without Dependance on him.

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.

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

There is no such thing as being good to your wife.

The subject matter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of art is to make life better.

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.

Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.

It is a difficult thing to like anybody else's ideas of being funny.

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.

To know what one knows is frightening to live what one lives is soothing and though everybody likes to be frightened what they really have to have is soothing.

Well money is not easy to describe. It is easy to lose but it cannot be lost, and no one can get really get used to it.

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

History takes time. History makes memory.

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

Once upon a time Baltimore was necessary.

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.

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.

The thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is the first of the last generation.

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

All the world knows how to cry but not all the world knows how to sigh. Sighing is extra.

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

If you can do it then why do it?

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

Very likely education does not make very much difference.

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

Cooking like everything else in France is logic and fashion.