Quotes by Natalie Barney

• The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.
• Youth is not a question of years: one is young or old from birth.
• Would that well-thinking people should be replaced by thinking ones.
• With renunciation life begins.
• 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.
• To be one's own master is to be the slave of self.
• Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.
• 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.
• Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity.
• Novels are longer than life.
• Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.
• Lovers should also have their days off.
• It is time for dead languages to be quiet.
• If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.
• How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue.
• Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.
• Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable.