Top 50 Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

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

— Natalie Clifford Barney

3. “It is time for dead languages to be quiet.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

4. “In love there is no status quo.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

5. “With renunciation life begins.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

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

— Natalie Clifford Barney

7. “Our shadows are taller than ourselves.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

8. “Might I be the one I am looking for?”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

9. “Novels are longer than life.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

10. “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

11. “Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

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

— Natalie Clifford Barney

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

— Natalie Clifford Barney

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

— Natalie Clifford Barney

15. “I judge people’s charm by the ease with which I express myself in their presence.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

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

— Natalie Clifford Barney

17. “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

18. “That parasite: the past.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

19. “My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

20. “Fashion: the search for a new absurdity.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

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

— Natalie Clifford Barney

22. “Eternity – waste of time.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

23. “Silence too can be indiscreet.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

24. “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

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

— Natalie Clifford Barney

26. “Like all religions, love has more believers than practitioners.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

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

— Natalie Clifford Barney

28. “It’s necessary to use suffering. Otherwise, one is used by it.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

29. “To those who ask if I have read their book, I reply: I have not yet read Homer.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

30. “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

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

— Natalie Clifford Barney

32. “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.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

33. “My only books were women’s looks.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

34. “To be one’s own master is to be the slave of self.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

35. “Seeking revenge: what a lack of foresight.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

36. “Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity...”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

37. “If only art were as rare as good taste...”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

38. “I’m fond of human beings, but only one at a time.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

39. “Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

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

— Natalie Clifford Barney

41. “I love the love of those who are far enough away, it becomes whatever I wish to believe it.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

42. “What makes bad writers so annoying is their good passages.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

43. “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

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

— Natalie Clifford Barney

45. “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

46. “To think about and prepare for war is boring, boring for everyone. It’s being locked in barracks.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

47. “Lovers should also have their days off.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

48. “Being other than normal is a perilous advantage.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

49. “To be married is to be neither alone nor together.”

— Natalie Clifford Barney

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

— Natalie Clifford Barney