Author · American · 1874 – 1946 · 102 quotes
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
Author · American · 1874 – 1946
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.
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.
Just before she died she asked, What is the answer? No answer came. She laughed and said, In that case, what is the question? Then she died.
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.
You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.
Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
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.
This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.
There is no such thing as being good to your wife.
Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.
In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.
Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.
War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.
There is a difference between twenty-nine and thirty. When you are twenty-nine it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty it can be the end of everything.
Action and reaction are equal and opposite.
Silent gratitude isn't very much to anyone.
A masterpiece... may be unwelcome but it is never dull.
What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.
Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.
Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.
I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.
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.
Hemingway's remarks are not literature.
I don't envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not.
We are always the same age inside.
It is very easy to love alone.
Remarks are not literature.
I think the reason I am important is that I know everything.
Let me listen to me and not to them.
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
If you can do it then why do it?
I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.
A diary means yes indeed.
There is no there there.
Romance is everything.
Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.
The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.
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?'
