Gertrude Stein quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Gertrude Stein has a lot to say. In this list we present the 72 best Gertrude Stein quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Gertrude Stein quotes
You look ridiculous if you danceYou look ridiculous if you don’t danceSo you might as welldance.
— Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.
— Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting… It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.
— Gertrude Stein
It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.
— Gertrude Stein
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
— Gertrude Stein
I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing
— Gertrude Stein, Three Lives & Tender Buttons
A FEATHER.A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.
— Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.
— Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein
It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.
— Gertrude Stein
I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.
— Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein
After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.
— Gertrude Stein, Paris France
it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.
— Gertrude Stein
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
— Gertrude Stein
It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before
— Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein
It is very easy to love alone.
— Gertrude Stein
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, Picasso
I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.
— Gertrude Stein
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, Ada
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.
— Gertrude Stein
A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”(on Ezra Pound)
— Gertrude Stein
Nature and man are opposed in Spain.
— Gertrude Stein, Picasso
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, What Are Masterpieces?
For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.
— Gertrude Stein
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, Picasso
nothing changes from one generation to another except the things seen and the things seen make that generation, that is to say nothing changes in people from one generation to another except the way of seeing and being seen.
— Gertrude Stein, Picasso
We are always the same age inside.
— Gertrude Stein
If you are too careful, you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
— Gertrude Stein
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, Picasso
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.
— Gertrude Stein
The central theme of the novel is that they were glad to see each other.
— Gertrude Stein
When you get there there isn’t any there there.
— Gertrude Stein
You have to learn to do everything even to die.
— Gertrude Stein
One must either accept some theory or else believe one’s own instinct or follow the world’s opinion.
— Gertrude Stein
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
Nothing has happened today except kindness.
— Gertrude Stein
Everybody gets so much common information all day long that they lose their common sense.
— Gertrude Stein
I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.
— 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
Considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really very frightening.
— 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
A rose is a rose is a rose.
— Gertrude Stein
Let me listen to me and not to them.
— Gertrude Stein
I was somewhat drunk with what I had done. And I am always one to prefer being sober.
— Gertrude Stein
We are always the same age inside.
— Gertrude Stein
Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.
— Gertrude Stein
I am because my little dog knows me.
— Gertrude Stein
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
— Gertrude Stein
If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.
— Gertrude Stein
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers dear Readers are an afterthought.
— Gertrude Stein
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.
— Gertrude Stein, Selected Operas and Plays
A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.
— 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
I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.
— Gertrude Stein
What is music. A passion for colonies not a love of country.
— 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
Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.
— 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
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
A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.
— 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
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
— Gertrude Stein
Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.
— Gertrude Stein
The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.
— 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
Romance is everything.
— Gertrude Stein
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
— Gertrude Stein
Men and girls, men and girls: Artificial swine and pearls.
— 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
There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.
— Gertrude Stein
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