Gertrude Stein

"The only way to survive in this world is to be honest about who you are."

"Strength is not in the muscles but in the will."

"Success is what you do when no one is watching."

"Freedom is the ability to say no."

"Work is the only thing that gives life meaning."

"Perseverance is just failure repeated with variation."

"Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans."

"Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful."

"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 more and more in the constantly impressed on you in increasing abundance more and more of knowing that, the thing that you are is always coming to be a new thing."

"I know that I know nothing."

"In order to do anything in this world first thing you have to do is forget about honor."

"A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."

"Suppose no one paid any attention to that and so you could go on and it would be true they have that to do."

"There is no more reason to remember one thing than another, a reason is only a reason when you remember it."

"One cannot come back too often to the question what one is and to the answer, one is oneself, one is here now."

"If you don't mind it doesn't matter."

"It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing."

"Remarks are not literature."

"What is the answer? When you know the answer you forget the question."

"Act so that there is no use in a future."

"The only way to be ahead of time is to have a complete moment entered in the writing that is of a piece."

"I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear readers, are an afterthought."

"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."

"Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation."

"It is funny the two things most discussed are the weather and health."

"Nothing is simple in the world and nothing is more interesting than the surface."

"A very little beauty is very beautiful."

"One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to obtain the conditions necessary for the achievement of his particular tasks."

"I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully."

"The difference between me and the surrealists is that I am a surrealist."