Gertrude Stein Quotes - Page 4

The way to resume is to resume. It is the only way. To resume.

The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one forget eternity and the fear of death.

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

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

There is no beginning to an end / But there is a beginning and an end / To beginning.

Is money money or isn't money money. Everybody who earns it and spends it every day in order to live knows that money is money, anybody who votes it to be gathered in as taxes knows money is not money. That is what makes everybody go crazy.... When you earn money and spend money every day anybody can know the difference between a million and three. But when you vote money away there really is not any difference between a million and three.

Nothing has happened today except kindness.

One must either accept some theory or else believe one's own instinct or follow the world's opinion.

College professors have two bad traits. They are logical and they are easily flattered.

Action and reaction are equal and opposite.

There is no passion more dominant and instinctive in the human spirit than the need of the country to which one belongs.... The time comes when nothing in the world is so important as a breath of one's own particular climate. If it were one's last penny it would be used for that return passage.

[On Ezra Pound:] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

When you get there, there isn't any there there.

One never discusses anything with anybody who can understand one discusses things with people who cannot understand.

No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.

A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.

Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one.

To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.

Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers' granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.

You attract what you need like a lover

What is the use of being a little boy if you are growing up to be a man.

there are the two sides to a Frenchman, logic and fashion and that is the reason why French people are exciting and peaceful. Logic and fashion.

To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.