Gertrude Stein Quotes

Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light; every eye, looking on, finds its own.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and consciousness is the ability to feel things and have subjective experiences.

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

Distinctly different as a child, as an adolescent, in his prime and in his old age, man considers himself as one, not because he acts, but because he knows.

The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.

The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.

I had the feeling . . . that my experience was very different from other people’s. (Are we all under this illusion?)

I've always known who I am. I might not work perfectly, or be like them, but that's okay. I know I work in my own way.

We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.

Figuring out who you are is the whole point of the human experience.

Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.

Freedom of expression is actually a way for people to know themselves better, and to understand themselves better. Because without it, you become a stranger to yourself.

...[E]very person perceives the world differently. So essentially, there are six billion human versions of reality on this planet, each perceiving its own truth.

A child should be allowed to take as long as she needs for knowing everything about herself, which is the same as learning to be herself. Even twenty-five years if necessary, or even forever. And it wouldn't matter if doing things got delayed, because nothing is really important but being oneself.

The people and circumstances around me do not make me what I am, they reveal who I am

I went to school, and I remember that you had to do these tests to find out what set you're in - how clever you are. I put down "Kit Harington," and they looked at me like I was completely stupid, and they said, "No, you're Christopher Harington, I'm afraid." It was only then I learnt my actual name. That was kind of a bizarre existential crisis for an 11-year-old to have, but in the end I always stuck with Kit, because I felt that's who I was. I'm not really a "Chris."

How can you spend hours every day trying in small ways to figure out who you are, then have a near-stranger give you a sentence of yourself that says it better than you ever could?

Once I became a professional, maybe 19 or 20, I really started to try to figure out who I was, as a woman and as an individual.

The eyes of my eyes are opened.

I think people who struggle to define themselves might never be satisfied because there is no definition. Living with responsibility is important, but I don't really think you have to grow up.

The way to eliminate ignorance is through steady, focused discrimination between the observer and the world.

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.

The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.

There's a lot about discovering who you are and how difficult that is. And it never stops.