Top 300 Gertrude Stein Quotes (2024 Update)
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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. “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

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

— Gertrude Stein

205. “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

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

— Gertrude Stein

207. “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

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

210. “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

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

— Gertrude Stein

212. “I write for myself and strangers.”

— Gertrude Stein

213. “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

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

— Gertrude Stein

215. “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

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

218. “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

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

226. “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

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

231. “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

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. “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

236. “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

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

248. “An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.”

— Gertrude Stein

249. “More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.”

— Gertrude Stein

250. “No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept.”

— Gertrude Stein