Famous Quotes

Quotes by Gertrude Stein

• A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.
• A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
• An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.
• Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.
• 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?'
• Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.
• Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.
• Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
• History takes time. History makes memory.
• I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.
• I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.
• 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.
• 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.
• It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business.
• It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.
• It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.
• It is very easy to love alone.
• 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.
• Men cannot count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so.
• 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.
• Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
• Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
• Romance is everything.
• 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 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.
• The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.
• The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.
• There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.
• There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.
• This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.
• Very likely education does not make very much difference.
• War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.
• We are always the same age inside.
• What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.
• What is music. A passion for colonies not a love of country.
• 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.