Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Steinwas an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector. Born in the Allegheny West neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures in modernism in literature and art would meet, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Henri Matisse...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 February 1874
CityPittsburgh, PA
CountryUnited States of America
Some men and women are inquisitive about everything, they are always asking, if they see any one with anything they ask what is that thing, what is it you are carrying, what are you going to be doing with that thing, why have you that thing, where did you get that thing, how long will you have that thing, there are very many men and women who want to know about anything about everything.
The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.
Men and girls, men and girls: Artificial swine and pearls.
. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.
Men cannot count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so.
The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand.
If the stars are suns and the earth is the earth and there are men only upon this earth and anything can put an end to anything and any dog does anything like anybody does it what is the difference between eternity and anything.
There is no reason why a king should be rich or a rich man should be a king, no reason at all.
We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me why American men think that success is everything when they know that eighty percent of them are not going to succeed more than to just keep going and why if they are not why do they not keep on being interested in the things that interested them when they were college men and why American men different from English men do not get more interesting as they get older.
Men ... are so conservative, so selfish, so boresome, and ... they are so ugly, and ... they are gullible, anybody can convince them.
We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don't know that men can do what women can do. That's absolutely crucial. We can't go on doing two jobs.
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 ...
It is very funny about money. The thing that differentiates man from animals is money. All animals have the same emotions and the same ways as men. Anybody who has lots of animals around knows that. But the thing no animal can do is count, and the thing no animal can know is money.
It gave me a great notion of the credit of our present government and administration, to find people press as eagerly to pay moneyas they would to receive it; and, at the same time, a due respect for that body of men who have found out so pleasing an expedient for carrying on the common cause, that they have turned a tax into a diversion.