Natalie Clifford Barney's Quotes

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.

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

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

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

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

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

With renunciation life begins.

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

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

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

It is time for dead languages to be quiet.

Lovers should also have their days off.

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

Novels are longer than life.

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

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

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

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.

All is amiss. Love is dying, faith's defying, heart's denying.

He that is thy friend indeed, he will help thee in thy need: if thou sorrow, he will weep; if you wake, he cannot sleep; thus of every grief in heart he with thee doth bear a part.