Gertrude Stein Quotes

To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.

We live our lives based on who we think we are.

We have to really educate ourselves in a way about who we are, what our real identity is.

What you are is a question only you can answer.

I know that I am what I am. But I am not sure what I am.

Figure out who you are.

I always want to stay focused on who I am, even as I'm discovering who I am.

I didn't want to make cinema so a person forgets himself and has a lot of fun. 'I forget myself, I am a little poor consumer.' I wanted to make a picture where someone who sees it say, 'This is me! This is me!'

I don't like defining myself. I just am.

I'm looking for the truth. The audience doesn't come to see you, they come to see themselves.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Who am I, really? I prefer to leave that up to the observer, because I will never finish answering that.

We have to have a very clear understanding of ourselves.

'Shortcomings' was me figuring out who I am.

If you don't know yourself, you don't know your nature. If you don't know your nature, you don't know where to exist. By knowing your nature, knowing yourself, you know what to be and how to live. And that only comes from knowledge of self, knowing yourself.

I've spent my life cultivating knowledge of myself. But the more I know myself, the more utterly mysterious I become.

First you have to know who you are. That is the most important thing, as if you don't know who you are you will either get swallowed up or you follow some unsuitable trends and just become a nonentity.

Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.

You know more about me than I do about myself, that's probably true.

I can't stand outside myself and be anybody else.

There's no reason to change what you are, but if you're not being you, then you need to acknowledge that.

People have to learn who they are - you can't have somebody else telling you who you are.

My problem was I let myself become known before I knew myself.

If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.

If you asked me for my New Year Resolution, it would be to find out who I am.