Quotes from Natalie Clifford Barney

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Paris has always seemed ... the only city where you can live and express yourself as you please.

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

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

anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.

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

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

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

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

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

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

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

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

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.

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

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.

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

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.

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