Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natalie Clifford Barney
The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating.

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

Natalie Clifford Barney
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.

Natalie Clifford Barney
Tea—that perfume that one drinks, that connecting hyphen.

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
He accumulated a wide vocabulary and waited all his life for an idea.

Natalie Clifford Barney
If only 'right-thinking' people could be replaced by thinking people.

Natalie Clifford Barney
You are so much more beautiful than the things that will befall you.

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

Natalie Clifford Barney
If they were only free thinkers, but they are free speakers!

Natalie Clifford Barney
Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.

Natalie Clifford Barney
Anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.

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

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

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

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

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

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