In the words of Gertrude Stein:
One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.
It is so friendly so simply friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occurring not a shock.
Generally speaking, everyone is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.
You look ridiculous if you dance You look ridiculous if you don't dance So you might as well dance.
Every day is a renewal, every morning the daily miracle. This joy you feel is life.
You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!
I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.
It is inevitable when one has a great need of something one finds it. What you need you attract like a lover.
Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.
A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.
Nobody knows what I am trying to do but I do and I know when I succeed.
Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.
The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.
Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.
One must either accept some theory or else believe one's own instinct or follow the world's opinion.
Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.
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.
If you are a thinker, you will change the language. You will not use words the way others do.
It is nice in France they adapt themselves to everything slowly they change completely but all the time they know that they are as they were.
Perhaps I am not I even if my little dog knows me but anyway I like what I have and now it is today.
One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say.
An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.
Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.
Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.
The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.
Once upon a time the world was round, and you could go on it around and around.
The subject matter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of art is to make life better.
Adventure is making the distant approach nearer but romance is having what is where it is which is not where you are stay where it is.
All the world knows how to cry but not all the world knows how to sigh. Sighing is extra.
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes American what it is.
Animals in different countries have different expressions just as the people in different countries differ in expression.
There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.
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.
More Quotes
