Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

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

- Natalie Clifford Barney

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

- Natalie Clifford Barney

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

- 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

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

- Natalie Clifford Barney

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

- Natalie Clifford Barney

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

- Natalie Clifford Barney

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

- 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

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

- Natalie Clifford Barney

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

- Natalie Clifford Barney

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

- Natalie Clifford Barney

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

- Natalie Clifford Barney

Lovers should also have their days off.

- Natalie Clifford Barney

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

- Natalie Clifford Barney

It is time for dead languages to be quiet.

- Natalie Clifford Barney