Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Quotes

It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Girls usually have a paper mâché face on their wedding day.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Be happy. It's one way of being wise.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Total absence of humor renders life impossible.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

On this narrow planet, we have only the choice between two unknown worlds. One of them tempts us --ah! what a dream, to live in that! --the other stifles us at the first breath.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

You do not notice changes in what is always before you.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

It's nothing to be born ugly. Sensibly, the ugly woman comes to terms with her ugliness and exploits it as a grace of nature. To become ugly means the beginning of a calamity, self-willed most of the time.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

January, month of empty pockets! Let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Is suffering so very serious? I have come to doubt it. It may be quite childish, a sort of undignified pastime -- I'm referring to the kind of suffering a man inflicts on a woman or a woman on a man. It's extremely painful. I agree that it's hardly bearable. But I very much fear that this sort of pain deserves no consideration at all. It's no more worthy of respect than old age or illness.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Among all the modernized aspects of the most luxurious of industries, the model, a vestige of voluptuous barbarianism, is like some plunder-laden prey. She is the object of unbridled regard, a living bait, the passive realization of an ideal. No other female occupation contains such potent impulses to moral disintegration as this one, applying as it does the outward signs of riches to a poor and beautiful girl.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut Animals up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great height to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph... Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Shall we never have done with that cliche, so stupid that it could only be human, about the sympathy of animals for man when he is unhappy? Animals love happiness almost as much as we do. A fit of crying disturbs them, they'll sometimes imitate sobbing, and for a moment they'll reflect our sadness. But they flee unhappiness as they flee fever, and I believe that in the long run they are capable of boycotting it.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette