. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.
Gertrude SteinRead
I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.
Interpretation
The quote suggests a preference for introspection and self-reflection over external distractions.
Gertrude Steinβs quote reflects on the difference between experiencing beauty and turning one's attention inward. It implies that the value of a beautiful view is often overshadowed by the importance of personal contemplation and the inner experience that comes from focusing on one's thoughts and feelings rather than on the outside world.
In practice
During a motivational speech about the importance of self-reflection.
. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.
The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.
If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.
The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.
It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.
Envy assails the noblest: the winds howl around the highest peaks.
When all the arguments have been forgotten, this central fact will remain. The two nations fought a single war, and their quarrels were the quarrels of brothers.
And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.
One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it-- it was the black kitten's fault entirely.
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.
Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.
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