Success Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein lands the punch with a paradox that feels even sharper now: information, the thing we’re told will clarify the world, can also erode the very faculty that makes clarity possible. The line is deceptively plain, built on the blunt accumulation of “so much” and “all day long” until the reader feels the fatigue it describes. Then she flips the expected outcome. More input doesn’t produce better judgment; it short-circuits it.

The intent is less anti-knowledge than anti-overload. Stein was writing out of a modernist moment obsessed with speed, novelty, and the destabilizing churn of new media and new ideas. Her broader project often dismantled the idea that meaning naturally arrives if you simply pile up words or facts. Here, “common sense” isn’t folksy wisdom so much as a baseline capacity to sift, rank, and decide. When the stream never stops, the mind loses the quiet space where interpretation happens.

The subtext is a critique of prestige and busyness: being “informed” can become a performance, a way to signal modernity while outsourcing judgment to the volume of what you’ve consumed. Stein’s phrasing also carries a sly democratic sting. Common sense belongs to everyone, but it’s also fragile; it can be drowned by the very systems that claim to educate and enlighten.

What makes the line work is its calm certainty. No melodrama, no manifesto - just a clean diagnosis of cognitive saturation, delivered like a fact of weather. Stein doesn’t plead for ignorance; she argues for boundaries, for digestion, for the mental right to stop scrolling before judgment collapses into noise.