Quotes By Gertrude Stein

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

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.

Just as everybody has the vote including women, I think children should, because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens.

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.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

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.

Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.

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.

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.

That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back.

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

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.

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.

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

Supposing everyone lived at one time what would they say. They would observe that stringing string beans is universal.

But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, 'How can I combine career and family?'

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

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

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.

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