Top 300 Gertrude Stein Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.”

— Gertrude Stein

152. “One must either accept some theory or else believe one’s own instinct or follow the world’s opinion.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

155. “Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.”

— Gertrude Stein

156. “An audience is pleasant if you have it, it is flattering and flattering is agreeable always, but if you have an audience the being an audience is their business, they are the audience you are the writer, let each attend to their own business.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

158. “If a thing can be done, why do it?”

— Gertrude Stein

159. “This joy you feel is life.”

— Gertrude Stein

160. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

161. “There are two kinds of men and women, those who have in them resisting as their way of winning those who have in them attacking as their way of winning...”

— Gertrude Stein

162. “Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.”

— Gertrude Stein

163. “Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.”

— Gertrude Stein

164. “Patriarchal Poetry makes mistakes.”

— Gertrude Stein

165. “If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.”

— Gertrude Stein

166. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

167. “It is a difficult thing to like anybody else’s ideas of being funny.”

— Gertrude Stein

168. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

169. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

170. “From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional.”

— Gertrude Stein

171. “It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.”

— Gertrude Stein

172. “Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.”

— Gertrude Stein

173. “I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.”

— Gertrude Stein

174. “You attract what you need like a lover.”

— Gertrude Stein

175. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

176. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

177. “French people do like good fighting, they like it better than anything.”

— Gertrude Stein

178. “I have heard Will Honeycomb say, A Woman seldom Writes her Mind but in her Postscript.”

— Gertrude Stein

179. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

180. “Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates.”

— Gertrude Stein

181. “If anything is a surprise then there is not much difference between older and younger because the only thing that does make anybody older is that they cannot be surprised.”

— Gertrude Stein

182. “I don’t envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not.”

— Gertrude Stein

183. “It is inevitable when one has a great need of something one finds it. What you need you attract like a lover.”

— Gertrude Stein

184. “A light white, a disgras, an ink spot, a rosy charm.”

— Gertrude Stein

185. “I was somewhat drunk with what I had done. And I am always one to prefer being sober.”

— Gertrude Stein

186. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

187. “The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.”

— Gertrude Stein

188. “Nothing is more interesting than that something that you eat.”

— Gertrude Stein

189. “You’ll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.”

— Gertrude Stein

190. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

191. “I have lived half of my life in Paris, not the half the made me but the half in which I made what I made.”

— Gertrude Stein

192. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

193. “Success is the result achieved when nobody answers.”

— Gertrude Stein

194. “At any moment when you are you, you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you, you are not for the purposes of creating you.”

— Gertrude Stein

195. “The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn’t make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.”

— Gertrude Stein

196. “It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

198. “A frontier is a division between countries. A history of a country is not a history of the changing of frontiers although many think so particularly those near the frontier the history of a country is why they like things which they have and which they do not exchange for other things for which they do not care.”

— Gertrude Stein

199. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

200. “I wish that I was where I am.”

— Gertrude Stein