Natalie Clifford Barney famous quotes

It is time for dead languages to be quiet.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Quiet #Language

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

#Inspirational #Wise #Men

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Business #Entrepreneur #Lasts

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.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Love #Valentines Day #Confused

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.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Inspiration #Writing #Night

With renunciation life begins.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Renunciation

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Demand #Seduction #Virtue

My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Vices #Harm

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

#Thinking #People #Intention

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

#Said #Traps #Insincerity

A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Fall #Tree #Fruit

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?
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Men #Quality #Female

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.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Eye #Hair #Vices

Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Normal #Advantage

I am not a bibliophile but a humanophile: I look for rare human beings.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Looks #Bibliophiles #Humans

I'm fond of human beings, but only one at a time.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Humans #Sociability

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

#Hero #Bows #Today

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

#Past #Made #Ends

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?
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Pain #Powerful #Men

In love there is no status quo.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Status Quo

Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Believer

My only books were women's looks.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Book #Looks

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.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Style #Abuse #Foundation

Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Sensuality

... anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Rooftops #Difficult

Indiscretion has always seemed to me to be one of the privileges of tact.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Privilege #Tact

What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Annoying #Passages

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

#Book

Fashion: the search for a new absurdity.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Fashion #Absurdity

Eternity: what a waste of time.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Waste #Wasting Time #Eternity

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.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Art #Expression #Way

If only art were as rare as good taste ...
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Art #Taste

A good book is never exhausted; we are never exhausted by a good book.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Book #Exhausted #Good Book

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

#Judging #People #Ease

The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Creativity #Creating #Life Is

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

#Doubt #Purity #Deny

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.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Real #People #Hours

The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#First Love #Sight #Delay

It's necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Suffering #Use #Used

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.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Reality #Intangible #Interpreter

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.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#God #Names #Sin

Eternity - waste of time.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Time #Waste #Wasting Time

Lovers should also have their days off.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Love #Days Off #Lovers

Novels are longer than life.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Life #Novel

Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Years #Youth #Birth

Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Time #Tears #Faces

Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Men #Lazy #Literature

Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Revenge #Foresight

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

#Believe #Wish #Enough

Tea - that perfume that one drinks, that connecting hyphen ...
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Tea #Drink #Perfume

Silence too can be indiscreet.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Silence

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

#Fall #Thinking #Tolerance

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity....
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Heroism #Mediocrity

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

#Wife #Mistress

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

#Learning #Heart #Dark

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

#Ambition

To be married is to be neither alone nor together.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Together #Married #Being Married

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

#Paris #Cities #Fit

That parasite: the past.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Past #Parasites

Some people make it hard for me to believe in universal evolution.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Believe #People #Evolution

One is not oneself every day-fortunately.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Personality #Oneself

Our prejudices, our antipathies, are our natural defenses against what we could not assimilate.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Prejudice #Defense #Natural

Might I be the one I am looking for?
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Might

To be one's own master is to be the slave of self.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Self #Slave #Masters

Our shadows are taller than ourselves.
-- Natalie Clifford Barney

#Shadow