Top 300 Gertrude Stein Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.”

— Gertrude Stein

252. “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

253. “As there was never any question there was never any answer.”

— Gertrude Stein

254. “There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.”

— Gertrude Stein

255. “You cannot go into the womb to form the child; it is there and makes itself and comes forth whole-and there it is and you have made it and have felt it, but it has come itself.”

— Gertrude Stein

256. “You have to learn to do everything, even to die.”

— Gertrude Stein

257. “The head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything.”

— Gertrude Stein

258. “There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.”

— Gertrude Stein

259. “In America, everybody is, but some are more than others.”

— Gertrude Stein

260. “Don’t write about what you don’t know even if you don’t know it.”

— Gertrude Stein

261. “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

262. “Too few is as many as too many.”

— Gertrude Stein

263. “Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.”

— Gertrude Stein

264. “Any time is the time to make a poem.”

— Gertrude Stein

265. “Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.”

— Gertrude Stein

266. “I had always been so much taken with the way all English people I knew always were going to see their lawyer. Even if they have no income and do not earn anything they always have a lawyer.”

— Gertrude Stein

267. “The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant sees it.”

— Gertrude Stein

268. “You have to know what you want to get it.”

— Gertrude Stein

269. “Since it could be done what was the use of doing it, and anyway you always have to stop doing something sometime.”

— Gertrude Stein

270. “When you earn it and spend it you do know the difference between three dollars and a million dollars, but when you say it and vote it, it all sounds the same.”

— Gertrude Stein

271. “The thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe.”

— Gertrude Stein

272. “The painter does not conceive himself as existing in himself, he conceives himself as a reflection of the objects he has put into his pictures and he lives in the reflections of his pictures, a writer, a serious writer, conceives himself as existing by and in himself, he does not at all live in the reflection of his books, to write he must first of all exist in himself, but for a painter to be able to paint, the painting must first of all be done.”

— Gertrude Stein

273. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

274. “I was undone by my Auxiliary; when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without Dependance on him.”

— Gertrude Stein

275. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

276. “The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.”

— Gertrude Stein

277. “What happened to-day, a narrative.”

— Gertrude Stein

278. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

279. “It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.”

— Gertrude Stein

280. “It is an extraordinary thing but it is true, wars are only a means of publicising the things already accomplished.”

— Gertrude Stein

281. “I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.”

— Gertrude Stein

282. “One never discusses anything with anybody who can understand one discusses things with people who cannot understand.”

— Gertrude Stein

283. “One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english. I do not know if it would have been possible to have english be so all in all to me otherwise. And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even know that I did write. No, I like living with so very many people and being all alone with english and myself.”

— Gertrude Stein

284. “I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody said that she does not look like it, but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.”

— Gertrude Stein

285. “Spaniards and Americans are not like Europeans, they are not like Orientals, they have something in common, that is they do not need religion or mysticism not to believe in reality as all the world knows it, not even when they see it.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

287. “Wake a question. Eat an instant, answer.”

— Gertrude Stein

288. “I could never be one of two I could never be two in one as married couples do and can, I am but one all one, one and all one, and so I have never been married to any one.”

— Gertrude Stein

289. “What is a nail. A nail is unison.”

— Gertrude Stein

290. “I take back all the harsh things I said about your writing. It makes a picture and that is always good. But it is alright to learn to play Bach in writing too.”

— Gertrude Stein

291. “The important thing, she insists, is that you must have deep down as the deepest thing in you a sense of equality. Then anybody will do anything for you.”

— Gertrude Stein

292. “How likely are definitions to be pleasurable.”

— Gertrude Stein

293. “Familiarity does not breed contempt, anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful. And that is all as it should be.”

— Gertrude Stein

294. “She told her father Mr. Abram Colhard that she did not like it at all being one being living then. He never said anything. She was afraid then, she was one needing charming stories and happy telling of them and not having that thing she was always trembling.”

— Gertrude Stein

295. “Anyone who marries three girls from St Louis hasn’t learned much.”

— Gertrude Stein

296. “Paris was where the twentieth century was.”

— Gertrude Stein

297. “She liked hats, she had the true french feeling about a hat, if a hat did not provoke some witticism from a man on the street the hat was not a success.”

— Gertrude Stein

298. “Sure, she said, as Pablo once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don’t have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it.”

— Gertrude Stein

299. “A seal and matches and a swan and ivy and a suit.”

— Gertrude Stein

300. “It was an endless variety. And everybody came and no one made any difference. Gertrude Stein sat peacefully in a chair and those who could did the same, the rest stood. There were the friends who sat around the stove and talked and there were the endless strangers who came and went. My memory of it is very vivid.”

— Gertrude Stein