Best 266 quotes of Gertrude Stein on MyQuotes

Action and reaction are equal and opposite.

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.

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.

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.

A creator is so completely contemporary that he has the appearance of being ahead of his generation.

A diary means yes indeed.

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.

A FEATHER. A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.

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

All the world knows how to cry but not all the world knows how to sigh. Sighing is extra.

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

America is my country and Paris is my hometown.

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.

And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.

A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.

A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.

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

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.

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.

... 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.

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

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

Argument is to me the air I breathe.

art is the pulse of a nation.

A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints In Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything. Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something.

Asparagus in a lean in a lean is to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet

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

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 virgin a whole virgin is judged made and so between curves and outlines and real seasons and more out glasses and a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies and mild colds there is no satin wood shining.

A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.

Before one is successful that is before any one is ready to pay money for anything you do then you are certain that every word you have written is an important word to have written and that any word you have written is as important as any other word and you keep everything you have written with great care.

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.

But now well democracy has shown us that what is evil are the grosses têtes, the big heads, all big heads are greedy for money and power, they are ambitious that is the reason they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people. They talk about cutting off the heads of the grosses têtes but now we know that there will be other grosses têtes and the will be all the same.

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?'

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.

College professors have two bad traits. They are logical and they are easily flattered.

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

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

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

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

Dogs are dogs, you sometimes think that they are not but they are. And they always are here there and everywhere.

Do not forget birthdays. This is in no way a propaganda for a larger population.

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

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

each generation has something different at which they are all looking.

Eating and sleeping are not like loving and breathing. Washing is not like eating and sleeping. Believing is like breathing and loving. Religion can be believing, it can be like breathing, it can be like loving, it can be like eating or sleeping, it can be like washing, it can be something to fill up a place when someone has lost out of them a piece that it was not natural for them to have in them.

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

Even the propagandists on the radio find it very difficult to really say let alone believe that the world will be a happy place, of love and peace and plenty, and that the lion will lie down with the lamb and everybody will believe anybody.

Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.