Gertrude Stein – 40 Quotes

40 Quotes by Gertrude Stein

We are always the same age inside.

– Gertrude Stein

It is very easy to love alone.

– Gertrude Stein

When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.

– Gertrude Stein

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

– Gertrude Stein

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

It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business.

– Gertrude Stein

Money is always there but the pockets change it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.

– Gertrude Stein

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

– Gertrude Stein

It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.

– Gertrude Stein

Very likely education does not make very much difference.

– Gertrude Stein

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

– Gertrude Stein

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

– Gertrude Stein

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

– Gertrude Stein

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?’

– Gertrude Stein

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.

– Gertrude Stein

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

It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.

– Gertrude Stein

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

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

History takes time. History makes memory.

– Gertrude Stein

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

– Gertrude Stein

It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

– Gertrude Stein

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

– Gertrude Stein

What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.

– Gertrude Stein

The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.

– Gertrude Stein

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

– Gertrude Stein

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

– Gertrude Stein

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

– Gertrude Stein

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

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

– Gertrude Stein

There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.

– Gertrude Stein

Romance is everything.

– Gertrude Stein

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

– Gertrude Stein

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

– Gertrude Stein

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

– Gertrude Stein

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

– Gertrude Stein

That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back.

– Gertrude Stein

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

– Gertrude Stein

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

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

– Gertrude Stein