. . . 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
Eating and sleeping are not like loving and breathing. Washing is not like eating and sleeping. Believing is like breathing and loving. Religion can be believing, it can be like breathing, it can be like loving, it can be like eating or sleeping, it can be like washing, it can be something to fill up a place when someone has lost out of them a piece that it was not natural for them to have in them.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote explores the profound nature of belief and religion compared to basic human needs and actions.
In this quote, Gertrude Stein reflects on the different levels of human actions and their significance, positing that while eating and sleeping are essential physical needs, believing is tied to deeper emotional and spiritual experiences akin to breathing and loving. She suggests that religion, like belief, serves various roles in people's lives—sometimes fulfilling a void left by something essential that was lost, underscoring its complexity and depth beyond mere routine.
Themes
BeliefReligionSpiritualityLoveExistenceMeaning
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the role of spirituality in human life, this quote can emphasize how belief nourishes the soul.
More from Gertrude Stein
All quotes →The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.
Gertrude SteinRead
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.
Gertrude SteinRead
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.
Gertrude SteinRead
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.
Gertrude SteinRead
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.
Gertrude SteinRead
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