Top 363 Quotes & Sayings by Gertrude Stein - Page 5

Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realising everything and every one comes out of them in repeating. More and more then every one comes to be clear to some one.

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

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.

It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay for you and when your public knows you and does want to pay for you, you are not the same you.

Success is the result achieved when nobody answers.

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.

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.

One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say.

It is very funny about money. The thing that differentiates man from animals is money. All animals have the same emotions and the same ways as men. Anybody who has lots of animals around knows that. But the thing no animal can do is count, and the thing no animal can know is money.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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. But really a novel goes as dreams go in sleeping at night and some dreams are like anything and some dreams are like something and some dreams change and some dreams are quiet and some dreams are not. And some dreams are just what any one would do only a little different always just a little different and that is what a novel is.

... 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.

One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all.

It gave me a great notion of the credit of our present government and administration, to find people press as eagerly to pay moneyas they would to receive it; and, at the same time, a due respect for that body of men who have found out so pleasing an expedient for carrying on the common cause, that they have turned a tax into a diversion.

When in a museum, walk slowly but keep walking.

The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.

I really do know that it can be done and if it can be done why do it...

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

Near a war is always not very near.

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.

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

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

. . . 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'll always be Alice Toklas if you'll be Gertrude Stein.

... anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.

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.

War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.

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

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.

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

It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.

The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand.

... there is no point in being realistic about here and now, no use at all not any, and so it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter.

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.

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.

Every man is the maker of his own fortune

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

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.

You are all a lost generation.

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

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

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.

Ezra Pound still lives in a village and his world is a kind of village and people keep explaining things when they live in a village.... I have come not to mind if certain people live in villages and some of my friends still appear to live in villages and a village can be cozy as well as intuitive but must one really keep perpetually explaining and elucidating?

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

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.

Family living can go on existing. Very many are remembering this thing are remembering that family living living can go on existing. Very many are quite certain that family living can go on existing. Very many are remembering that they are quite certain that family living can go on existing.

Language as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation and there is nopossible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that as long as humanity is anything.

Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world.... [ellipsis in source] He was always dominated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street.... He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial.

Once upon a time Baltimore was necessary.

... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.

Would I if I could by pushing a button would I kill five thousand Chinamen if I could save my brother from anything. Well I was very fond of my brother and I could completely imagine his suffering and I replied that five thousand Chinamen was something I could not imagine and so it was not interesting. One has to remember that about imagination, that is when the world gets dull when everybody does not know what they can or what they cannot really imagine.

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

A country house is not the same as a house in a country and a hotel in the country is not the same as a hotel in a town but is it in a small town.

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.