Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. Profoundly inspirational Gertrude Stein quotes will encourage you to think a little deeper than you usually would and broaden your perspective.
If you’re searching for poetry quotes that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of famous Horace quotes, top John Keats quotes and greatest Omar Khayyam quotes.
Famous Gertrude Stein Quotes
Anything scares me, anything scares anyone but really after all considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really very frightening.
But to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.
You have to know what you want. And if it seems to take you off the track, don’t hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be.
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.
You have a clear and lovely voice. Don’t be such a defeatist.
You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!
I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich.
The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.
A beauty is not suddenly in a circle. It comes with rapture. A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.
Hemingway did have one plot suggestion – he doesn’t quite believe that the protagonist doesn’t see that his fiancée is having an affair right before his eyes.
There are two kinds of men and women, those who have in them resisting as their way of winning those who have in them attacking as their way of winning.
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?
Asparagus in a lean in a lean is to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet.
Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.
There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.
There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.
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.
Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.
She always says she dislikes the abnormal…She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.
Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
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.
Inspirational Gertrude Stein Quotes
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.
I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Yes, he said, everybody said that she does not look like it, but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.
Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.
I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication.
It is very natural that every one who makes anything inside themselves that is makes it entirely out of what is in them does naturally have to have two civilizations. They have to have the civilization that makes them and the civilization that has nothing to do with them.
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Whoever said money can’t buy happiness didn’t know where to shop.
I had a family. They can be a nuisance in identity but there is no doubt no shadow of doubt that that identity the family identity we can do without.
In the United States, there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.
America is my country, and Paris is my home town.
Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics.
For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.
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.
The thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe.
If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.
The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.
One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.
There is no pleasure so sweet as the pleasure of spending money but the pleasure of writing is longer. There is no denying that.
From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional. If they were not, the world would be at a stand-still and death would speedily ensue. It is one of the tamest of platitudes but it is always introduced by a flourish of trumpets.
You make a petit bourgeoise judgment and turn her into an object of pleasure.
I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.
We are always the same age inside.
Too few is as many as too many.
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.
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.
Grammar little by little is not a thing. Which may gain.
The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.
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 artist works by locating the world in himself.
Now they can do the radio in so many languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one, anybody can hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing, so what is the use of conquering.
A creator is so completely contemporary that he has the appearance of being ahead of his generation.
