Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

... anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.

It is time for dead languages to keep quiet.

Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.

Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.

I'm fond of human beings, but only one at a time.

I love the love of those who are far enough away, it becomes whatever I wish to believe it.

My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.

Lovers should also have their days off.

Tea - that perfume that one drinks, that connecting hyphen.

Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.

Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.

Our shadows are taller than ourselves.

Being bilingual is like having a wife and a mistress. One can never be sure of either.

To mis-quote is the very foundation of original style. The success of most writers is almost entirely due to continuous and courageous abuse of familiar misquotation.

Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.

if I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem.

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.

Paris has always seemed to me to be the only city in which one can live as one sees fit.

There are. intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Eternity - waste of time.

I am not a bibliophile but a humanophile: I look for rare human beings.

It's necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.

A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness.

Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.

A good book is never exhausted; we are never exhausted by a good book.

Fashion: the search for a new absurdity.

My only books were women's looks.

In love there is no status quo.

To think about and prepare for war is boring, boring for everyone. It's being locked in barracks.

Hero worship has died with heroes, and if someone bows down today, it is to pick up something.

I judge people's charm by the ease with which I express myself in their presence.

That parasite: the past.

What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.

The past is such a subtle thing. [But] in the end, nothing else exists, everything is made of the past, even the future.

If only art were as rare as good taste.

Novels are longer than life.

Eternity: what a waste of time.

Our prejudices, our antipathies, are our natural defenses against what we could not assimilate.

Avoid that romantic trap: saying more than you feel, forcing yourself to feel more than you've said!

The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.

To be one's own master is to be the slave of self.

Some people make it hard for me to believe in universal evolution.

I do not understand those who spend hours at the theater watching scenes between people whom they would not listen to for five minutes in real life.

One is not oneself every day-fortunately.