66+ Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes On Friendship, Education And Book

Natalie Clifford Barney was an American author, poet, playwright, and novelist. She is best known for her salon in Paris, which was a gathering place for many of the leading artists and writers of the Lost Generation. Her works focused on lesbian themes and the exploration of female identity and desire. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Natalie Clifford Barney on friendship, education, love.

Top 10 Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

1. ... anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.
2. Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists when you can ignore them like wise men?
3. Lovers should also have their days off.
4. Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.
5. Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.
6. If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.
7. To be one's own master is to be the slave of self.
8. Tea - that perfume that one drinks, that connecting hyphen.
9. Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.
10. The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.

Natalie Clifford Barney Short Quotes

• Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.
• Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.
• Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.
• Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.
• Eternity -- waste of time.
• Indiscretion has always seemed to me to be one of the privileges of tact.
• A thought falls like a ripe fruit from the tree of idleness.
• Might I be the one I am looking for?
• Our shadows are taller than ourselves.
• What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.

Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes About Love

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

In love there is no status quo. — Natalie Clifford Barney

Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners. — 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

Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes About Book

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

My only books were women's looks. — Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes About Life

How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue — Natalie Clifford Barney

Novels are longer than life. — Natalie Clifford Barney

With renunciation life begins. — 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

if I had one ambition it was to make my life itself into a poem. — Natalie Clifford Barney

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

How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue. — Natalie Clifford Barney

Natalie Clifford Barney Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

Silence too can be indiscreet. — 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

One is not oneself every day-fortunately. — Natalie Clifford Barney

My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one. — Natalie Clifford Barney

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

To be married is to be neither alone nor together. — 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

That parasite: the past. — 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

If only art were as rare as good taste. — Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Fashion: the search for a new absurdity. — Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Eternity: what a waste of time. — Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight. — Natalie Clifford Barney

It is time for dead languages to keep quiet. — Natalie Clifford Barney

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

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

It's necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it. — Natalie Clifford Barney

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

Being other than normal is a perilous advantage. — 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

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

Life Lessons by Natalie Clifford Barney

1. Natalie Clifford Barney taught that life should be lived with passion and joy, and that one should never be afraid to take risks and be creative.
2. She also believed in the power of friendship, and that it is important to nurture relationships with those we care about.
3. Finally, she encouraged her readers to always strive for self-improvement, and to never be afraid to challenge themselves and grow.