Natalie Clifford Barney Quotations

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

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

When you're in love you never really know whether your elation comes from the qualities of the one you love, or if it attributes them to her; whether the light which surrounds her like a halo comes from you, from her, or from the meeting of your sparks.

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

It is time for dead languages to be quiet.

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.

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

Our shadows are taller than ourselves.

Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight.

Might I be the one I am looking for?

Eternity: what a waste of time.

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

The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.

doubt seems the only purity for those who are too fervent to deny, and too lucid to affirm.

Fashion: the search for a new absurdity.

We are nearly all composed of such a complex mixture of human qualities that in each one of us reside both masculine and feminine principles: what man is without any female attribute and what woman never demonstrates any masculine characteristics?

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

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

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

Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.

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

If only art were as rare as good taste ...

Novels are longer than life.

Eternity - waste of time.

We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.

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.

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity....

All expression, all art, is an indiscretion we commit against ourselves. This is not an 'impoverishment' but an increase in wealth, for it is in this way that we make the short hours of our lives live on beyond themselves.

albinos aren't reproached for having pink eyes and whitish hair, why should they hold it again me for being a lesbian? It's a question of nature: my queerness isn't a vice, isn't 'deliberate,' and harms no one.

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

In love there is no status quo.

Perhaps a reign of powerful women is necessary to make, or unmake when need be, powerful men. Women would not waste so readily and uselessly the lives they had such care and pain in bearing. Why should they submit to the massacre of the innocent, one generation after another ... and allow them to be brought up as live-stock for the inevitable killing?

To those who ask if I have read their book, I reply: I have not yet read Homer.

What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.

Indiscretion has always seemed to me to be one of the privileges of tact.

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

Silence too can be indiscreet.

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.

My only books were women's looks.

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

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!

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

A scholar's heart is a dark well in which are buried many aborted feelings that rise to the surface as arguments.

To be married is to be neither alone nor together.

Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.

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

That parasite: the past.

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

One is not oneself every day-fortunately.

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

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

With renunciation life begins.

Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.

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

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.

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

Lovers should also have their days off.

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