NATALIE CLIFFORD BARNEY

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

How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue.

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?

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

It is time for dead languages to be quiet.

Lovers should also have their days off.

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

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.

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

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

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.

Novels are longer than life.

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

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

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Silence too can be indiscreet.

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

Sensuality, wanting a religion, invented Love.

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.