Quotes By Gertrude Stein

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.

If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.

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

It is very easy to love alone.

I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.

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.

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

We are always the same age inside.

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore that name. Are they all alike. I think so.

Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

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

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

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.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

Silent gratitude isn't very much to anyone.

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.

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

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

A diary means yes indeed.

I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe.

One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.

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

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

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.

Generally speaking, everyone is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.