Top 300 Gertrude Stein Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 7

201. “I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe.”

— Gertrude Stein

202. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

203. “For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.”

— Gertrude Stein

204. “Mostly every one is needing some one to be one listening to that one being one being one boasting.”

— Gertrude Stein

205. “There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.”

— Gertrude Stein

206. “The souls of people do not interest him, that is to say for him the reality of life is in the head, the face and the body and this is for him so important, so persistent, so complete that it is not at all necessary to think of any other thing and the soul is another thing.”

— Gertrude Stein

207. “Some out of their own virtue make a god who sometimes later is a nuisance to them, a terror perhaps to them, a difficult thing to be forgetting.”

— Gertrude Stein

208. “Men and girls, men and girls: Artificial swine and pearls.”

— Gertrude Stein

209. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

210. “Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening.”

— Gertrude Stein

211. “I wish that I was where I am.”

— Gertrude Stein

212. “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes American what it is.”

— Gertrude Stein

213. “There are so many ways of earning a living and most of them are failures.”

— Gertrude Stein

214. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

217. “Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.”

— Gertrude Stein

218. “The family is always the family but during vacations it is an extended family and that is exhausting.”

— Gertrude Stein

219. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

220. “There is no real reality to a really imagined life any more.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

223. “I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing.”

— Gertrude Stein

224. “The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one forget eternity and the fear of death.”

— Gertrude Stein

225. “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

226. “Argument is to me the air I breathe.”

— Gertrude Stein

227. “There is no reason why a king should be rich or a rich man should be a king, no reason at all.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

229. “If the stars are suns and the earth is the earth and there are men only upon this earth and anything can put an end to anything and any dog does anything like anybody does it what is the difference between eternity and anything.”

— Gertrude Stein

230. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

231. “In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

234. “Near a war is always not very near.”

— Gertrude Stein

235. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

236. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

237. “The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.”

— Gertrude Stein

238. “What is music. A passion for colonies not a love of country.”

— Gertrude Stein

239. “I like familiarity. In me it does not bring contempt-only more familiarity.”

— Gertrude Stein

240. “It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

243. “War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

246. “You never answer a question nobody does.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

248. “In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.”

— Gertrude Stein

249. “If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.”

— Gertrude Stein

250. “Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.”

— Gertrude Stein