Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes - Page 2

Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight.

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

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.

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

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.

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

Eternity - waste of time.

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

With renunciation life begins.

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

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

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

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

One is not oneself every day-fortunately.

If only art were as rare as good taste.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

My only books were women's looks.