Biographile’s This Week in History remembers events of the past, and the icons that set them in motion. If you're stirred by the words below, read more inspiring author quotes.

Gertrude Stein was born on February 3, 1874, this day in history. Her larger-than-life presence in the early 1900s was important to an entire era of wayward artists. In her letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald, as Godmother to Hemingway's son, and at her Paris salon where she hosted everyone from Ezra Pound to Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein never failed to offer her frank advice and artistic guidance. As high priestess and neologist of The Lost Generation, Stein helped foster a new era of literary and cultural styles.

As a lesbian who slowly embraced her sexuality, she also helped define a gay literary heritage by penning one of the first "coming out" stories in 1903 ("Q. E. D"). Today, she is credited for having coined the term "gay" as it relates to homosexuality, as evidenced in her work "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene" where she used the word over one hundred times.

Stein is remembered as a lot of things. Iconoclastic. Assertive. A writer who broke boundaries. A champion of the arts. A fine host. A French socialite. And, because of all that, a person whose torrent of ideas makes it all too easy to arrange a bouquet of quotes for her 140th birthday.

1. "Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it." ("Form and Intelligibility," from The Radcliffe Manuscripts, 1949; written in 1895 as an undergraduate at Radcliffe College)

2. "The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just... I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand." (Manuscript, 1903, published in Q.E.D. Book 1, from Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings, 1971)

3. "Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches." ("If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso," 1923. First published in Vanity Fair.)

4. "One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure." (Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 22 May 1925, published in Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up, 1945)

5. "All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation... You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death." (Statement quoted by Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, 1964, Ch. 3, it had also provided the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, 1926)

6. "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." ("Sacred Emily," 1913)

7. "I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed." ("What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them," 1936)

8. "One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come." ("Paris France," 1940)

9. "Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything." ("The Making of Americans," 1925)