Natalie Clifford Barney

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

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

Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.

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

Novels are longer than life.

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

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

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

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

With renunciation life begins.

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.

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.

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.

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

Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.

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

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

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

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

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