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I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

— Gertrude Stein What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936)

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Simplicity

More quotes by Gertrude Stein

It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business.

What Is English Literature? (1935)

One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

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

Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)

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

Reflections on the Atom Bomb (1946)

The family is always the family but during vacations it is an extended family and that is exhausting

Paris France (1940)

All Gertrude Stein quotes →

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All religions are incorporated in the principle of Truth, Simplicity and Love.

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I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

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If you can’t reduce a difficult engineering problem to just one 8-1/2 x 11-inch sheet of paper, you will probably never understand it.

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Plurality is never to be posited without necessity.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gertrude Stein (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.