Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 62 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Natalie Clifford Barney.
Famous Quotes By Natalie Clifford Barney
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
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
Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men? — Natalie Clifford Barney
To think about and prepare for war is boring, boring for everyone. It's being locked in barracks. — Natalie Clifford Barney
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
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
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
Paris has always seemed to me to be the only city in which one can live as one sees fit. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Hero worship has died with heroes, and if someone bows down today, it is to pick up something. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Our prejudices, our antipathies, are our natural defenses against what we could not assimilate. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Avoid that romantic trap: saying more than you feel, forcing yourself to feel more than you've said! — Natalie Clifford Barney
Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners. — Natalie Clifford Barney
In love there is no status quo. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops. — Natalie Clifford Barney
A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness. — Natalie Clifford Barney
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
Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed. — Natalie Clifford Barney
The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Being bilingual is like having a wife and a mistress. One can never be sure of either. — Natalie Clifford Barney
To be married is to be neither alone nor together. — Natalie Clifford Barney
It is time for dead languages to be quiet. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Our shadows are taller than ourselves. — Natalie Clifford Barney
The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating. — Natalie Clifford Barney
That parasite: the past. — Natalie Clifford Barney
How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Might I be the one I am looking for? — Natalie Clifford Barney
If I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Eternity: what a waste of time. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Silence too can be indiscreet. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Paris has always seemed ... the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Novels are longer than life. — Natalie Clifford Barney
I love the love of those who are far enough away, it becomes whatever I wish to believe it. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight. — Natalie Clifford Barney
To be one's own master is to be the slave of self. — Natalie Clifford Barney
It's necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it. — Natalie Clifford Barney
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
Lovers should also have their days off. — Natalie Clifford Barney
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
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
I'm fond of human beings, but only one at a time. — Natalie Clifford Barney
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. — Natalie Clifford Barney
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
Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Indiscretion has always seemed to me to be one of the privileges of tact. — Natalie Clifford Barney
To those who ask if I have read their book, I reply: I have not yet read Homer. — Natalie Clifford Barney
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
If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Doubt seems the only purity for those who are too fervent to deny, and too lucid to affirm. — Natalie Clifford Barney
My only books were women's looks. — Natalie Clifford Barney
Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction. — Natalie Clifford Barney