. . . 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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Hope can sometimes blind us to reality, leading us to dangerous choices.
Gertrude Stein's quote suggests that while hope is a natural and comforting feeling, it can also mislead us. We often ignore the warning signs of potential pitfalls, allowing ourselves to be drawn into destructive situations by an enticing but ultimately harmful illusion of hope.
Themes
HopeIllusionRealityDangerAwareness
In practice
Example use cases
A motivational speaker addressing the risks of blind optimism in personal development.
More from Gertrude Stein
All quotes βThe 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
Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.
Gertrude SteinRead
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But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
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