Quotes By Gertrude Stein

Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air.

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.

Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.

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.

I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.

History takes time. History makes memory.

It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.

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

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

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.

Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.

A masterpiece... may be unwelcome but it is never dull.

The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.

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

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

America is my country and Paris is my hometown.

It is so friendly so simply friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occurring not a shock.

It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.

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

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

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

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.

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.

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

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

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

Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.

A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.

Human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the reality and interested in telling about it.

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