Top 363 Quotes & Sayings by Gertrude Stein - Page 3

The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.

You have to know what you want. And if it seems to take you off the track, don't hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry.

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

This joy you feel is life.

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.

Money is always there but the pockets change.

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.

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.

I am I because my little dog knows me.

One must dare to be happy.

I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.

When you get there, there isn't any there there.

There are a lot of other things besides nouns.

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.

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

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

Nobody knows what I am trying to do but I do and I know when I succeed.

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.

Silent gratitude isn't very much to anyone.

Any time is the time to make a poem.

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

art is the pulse of a nation.

A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.

Too few is as many as too many.

Art isn't everything. It's just about everything.

We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me why American men think that success is everything when they know that eighty percent of them are not going to succeed more than to just keep going and why if they are not why do they not keep on being interested in the things that interested them when they were college men and why American men different from English men do not get more interesting as they get older.

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

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.

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.

Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one.

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.

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.

Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.

Forensics is eloquence and reduction.

The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living.

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.

The artist works by locating the world in himself

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.

Is money money or isn't money money. Everybody who earns it and spends it every day in order to live knows that money is money, anybody who votes it to be gathered in as taxes knows money is not money. That is what makes everybody go crazy.... When you earn money and spend money every day anybody can know the difference between a million and three. But when you vote money away there really is not any difference between a million and three.

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

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.

A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.

Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?

If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.

[On Ezra Pound:] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

How likely are definitions to be pleasurable.

In America, everybody is, but some are more than others.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

you are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always very well taken care of if you come from Iowa.

This is the real thing of disillusion that no one, not any one really is believing, seeing, understanding, thinking anything as you are thinking, believing, seeing, understanding such a thing.

Nothing is more interesting than that something that you eat.

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.

Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.

You attract what you need like a lover

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

For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.

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