Natalie Clifford Barney quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Natalie Clifford Barney

Natalie Clifford Barney Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Natalie Clifford Barney on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our shadows are taller than ourselves.

Eternity: what a waste of time.

The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.

Silence too can be indiscreet.

It is time for dead languages to be quiet.

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

Might I be the one I am looking for?

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.

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

My only books were women's looks.

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

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

Novels are longer than life.

Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight.

In love there is no status quo.

Paris has always seemed ... the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please.

To be married is to be neither alone nor together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When she lowers her eyes she seems to hold all the beauty in the world between her eyelids; when she raises them I see only myself in her gaze.

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

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

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

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

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

Fashion: the search for a new absurdity.

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

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

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

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

Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.

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

What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.

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

Anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.

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

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

One is not oneself every day-fortunately.

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.

That parasite: the past.

Lovers should also have their days off.

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!

Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.