Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

Fashion: the search for a new absurdity.

One is not oneself every day-fortunately.

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

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 only art were as rare as good taste.

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

Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.

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

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

It is time for dead languages to keep quiet.

In love there is no status quo.

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.

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

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

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.

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.

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

Might I be the one I am looking for?

Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.

My only books were women's looks.

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

That parasite: the past.

Silence too can be indiscreet.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.

Our shadows are taller than ourselves.

Eternity - waste of time.

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

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

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.

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

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

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