Life & Wisdom Quote by Gertrude Stein

Hope gets cast here not as virtue but as a predator with good lighting. Stein turns what most writers treat as moral oxygen into something closer to a narcotic: "natural to indulge" makes optimism sound like a habit you slip into, not a principle you choose. The phrasing is deceptively calm, almost clinical, and that restraint is the knife twist. She isn’t condemning hope because she’s a pessimist; she’s suspicious of the mental comfort we mistake for clarity.

The siren image does heavy lifting. In myth, the danger isn’t brute force, it’s seduction - a song you participate in by listening. Stein’s subtext is that self-deception is collaborative: "We are apt to shut our eyes" describes an active refusal of evidence. The "siren" isn’t just external circumstance; it’s the story we tell ourselves so we don’t have to look at what’s coming. Death, in that sense, can be literal, political, or artistic: the demise of judgment, urgency, or ambition.

Context matters. Stein wrote in an era that saw modernity’s promises curdle into mechanized war and ideological certainty. As a modernist, she also distrusted inherited narratives - the neat, reassuring plots that pretend the world is legible and fair. Her intent feels like an intervention against sentimental thinking: hope without scrutiny doesn’t merely disappoint; it anesthetizes. The line works because it refuses consolation while exposing the pleasure of being fooled, and how eagerly we pay for it.