Life & Wisdom Quote by Natalie Clifford Barney

Barney’s line is a cocktail of moral provocation and social satire: she doesn’t merely condemn greed, she needles the era’s dominant arguments about it. By pairing “thieves” and “socialists,” she sets up two supposedly opposite camps and then flattens them into the same obsession - possession. One takes, one redistributes, but both remain enthralled by the premise that stuff is the central drama. The real flex, she suggests, is not winning the fight over property but exiting the ring entirely.

The rhetorical trick is the pivot from action to refusal. “Grab,” “divide,” then “ignore”: two verbs of grasping followed by a verb of transcendence. “Wise men” is a pointed phrase, too, coming from Barney - a salon impresario, queer icon, and master of social staging who spent a lifetime testing the boundaries of gender and respectability. The masculine-coded wisdom reads as both ironic and strategic: she borrows the authority of “wise men” to legitimize a posture that looks, to conventional society, like irresponsibility or decadence.

Context matters. Barney lived through fin-de-siecle capitalism, the aftershocks of revolution, and the ideological fever of the early 20th century. Her salon world depended on wealth, yet her literary persona cultivated an aristocratic disdain for bourgeois acquisition. The subtext is elitist and liberating at once: an invitation to detach from material competition, and a reminder that only certain people can afford to “ignore” possessions. That tension is the quote’s bite. It’s not a blueprint; it’s a dare.