Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972) was an American playwright, poet and novelist who lived as an expatriate in Paris. Barney’s salon was held at her home at 20 rue Jacob in Paris’ Left Bank for more than 60 years and brought together writers and artists from around the world, including many leading figures in French literature along with American and British Modernists of the Lost Generation. She worked to promote writing by women and formed a “Women’s Academy” in response to the all-male French Academy while also giving support and inspiration to male writers from Remy de Gourmont to Truman Capote.
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Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Intentions, Purpose
Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists, when you can ignore them like wise men?
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Possessions, Property, Riches
Fatalism is the lazy man’s way of accepting the inevitable.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Despair
To be one’s own master is to be the slave of self.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Independence
Lovers should also have their days off.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Lovers, Love
Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Heroism
Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Business
Novels are longer than life.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
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
Topics: Reality
Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Youth
Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Virtue
Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Face, Crying, Faces
If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Impartiality
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
Topics: Love
Eternity—waste of time.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Eternity, Time
How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Rest, Leisure
The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.
—Natalie Clifford Barney
Topics: Love
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
Topics: God
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