Gertrude Stein Quotes

Whoever said money can't buy happiness didn't know where to shop

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.

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.

You are all a lost generation.

America is my country and Paris is my hometown.

Coffee is real good when you drink it gives you time to think. It's 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.

In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.

Love: the skillful audacity required to share an inner life.

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.

That is what you are. That's what you all are...All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

Every day is a renewal, every morning the daily miracle. This joy you feel is life.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

You look ridiculous if you dance You look ridiculous if you don't dance So you might as well dance.

It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

There are two kinds of men and women, those who have in them resisting as their way of winning those who have in them attacking as their way of winning.

We are always the same age inside.

It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business

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.

There is no there there.

Forensics is eloquence and reduction.

When in a museum, walk slowly but keep walking.

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.

If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers' granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

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

One must dare to be happy.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.

art is the pulse of a nation.

The one thing that everybody wants is to be freenot to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free … The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.

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

In America ... who is to stop congress from spending too much money. They will not stop themselves, that is certain. Everybody has to think about that now. Who is to stop them.

Money is always there but the pockets change.

You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!

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

It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.

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 they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.

You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.

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.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer.

One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.