Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Gertrude Stein (American Writer)

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was an American writer, art collector, hostess, and self-proclaimed genius. Scholars consider her literary output noteworthy because her approach brought modernism to its reasonable extreme.

Born in Pittsburgh into a wealthy and intellectual family of German-Jewish origin, Stein abandoned medical studies before she settled in Paris in 1903. She returned to America on one occasion for a 1934 lecture tour. Her Parisian residence at 27 rue de Fleurus became famous as a literary and artistic salon during the 1920s and 1930s. As the focal point of the avant-garde in literature, art, music, and drama, Stein attracted not only painters such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris, but also writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and Sherwood Anderson.

Stein developed an esoteric stream-of-consciousness literary style, which, she claimed, was a literary counterpart of what she saw the great modern painters achieving with Cubism. Her writings are often obscure in form, unpunctuated, and focus on the rhythm and sound of words instead of their meaning.

Of Stein’s numerous short stories, novels, poems, operas, plays, essays, art criticism, lectures, autobiographies, and diaries, only two works have endured. Her first published book, Three Lives (1909,) examines the tedious details of the lives of three American working-class women. The best-known and the most accessible of her many books is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933,) which is her autobiography, composed as though by her longtime secretary and companion, Miss Toklas (1877–1967.)

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What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.
Gertrude Stein

We are always the same age inside.
Gertrude Stein

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: America

It is inevitable when one has a great need of something, one finds it. What you need you attract like a lover.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Abundance

Money is always there but the pockets change.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Money

Let me listen to myself and not to them.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Independence

Remarks are not literature.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Literature, Books

The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Animals

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.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Identity

Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Right, Anger, Anxiety, Fear, Courage

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.
Gertrude Stein

Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Misery, Money

One must either accept some theory or else believe one’s own instinct or follow the world’s opinion.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Public opinion

I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Class

The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Reality

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.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Aspirations

I was somewhat drunk with what I had done. And I am always one to prefer being sober.
Gertrude Stein

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting… It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.
Gertrude Stein

When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Sleep

Let me listen to me and not to them.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Self-reliance, Being Ourselves, Confidence

Silent gratitude isn’t very much to anyone.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Thankfulness

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
Topics: Men

If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Worry

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.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: America

The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: America

I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Desires, Desire

It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Genius

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Common Sense, Information

If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.
Gertrude Stein

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
Gertrude Stein
Topics: Imitation

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