“A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.”

— Gertrude Stein

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing." by Gertrude Stein?

Gertrude Stein 160

American art collector and experimental writer of novels, p… 1874–1946

Related quotes

“Finding one important thing in your life doesn’t mean you have to
give up all the other important things.”

Paulo Coelho book Brida

Source: Brida

“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Letter to Isham Reavis (5 November 1855)
1850s
Context: If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already. It is but a small matter whether you read with anyone or not. I did not read with anyone. Get the books, and read and study them till you understand them in their principal features; and that is the main thing. It is of no consequence to be in a large town while you are reading. I read at New Salem, which never had three hundred people living in it. The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places.... Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.

“The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book I, Chapter 2, "Some Objections"
Mere Christianity (1952)
Context: The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity", and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing--and keeping the unknown always beyond you.”

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) American artist

Quote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson, October 1923; as quoted in Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life, Roxana Robinson, University Press of New England, 1999
1917 - 1929
Context: I have been thinking of what you say about form... I feel that a real living form is the natural result of the individual’s effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown.... and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown known. By unknown I mean the thing that means so much to the person that he want to put it down - clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand... Making the unknown known.... if you stop to think of form as form you are lost.