Best 48 quotes of Natalie Clifford Barney on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

Eternity - waste of time.

Eternity: what a waste of time.

Fashion: the search for a new absurdity.

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

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

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

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.

If only art were as rare as good taste.

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

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

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

Lovers should also have their days off.

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

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

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

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight.

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

That parasite: the past.

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

The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.

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

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.

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

To be married is to be neither alone nor together.

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

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.

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

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?

What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.

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

With renunciation life begins.

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

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

I have sometimes lost friends, but friends have never lost me.

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

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.