Quotes By Natalie Clifford Barney

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

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

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

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

It is time for dead languages to be quiet.

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.

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

Lovers should also have their days off.

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

With renunciation life begins.

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

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

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

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.

How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue.

Novels are longer than life.