Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Quotes

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

Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave.

Is suffering so very serious? ... I'm referring to the kind of suffering a man inflicts on a woman or a woman on a man. It's extremely painful ... hardly bearable. But I very much fear that this sort of pain ... is no more worthy of respect than old age or illness.

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

Never touch a butterfly's wing with your finger.

A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.

There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment, for in another moment they will recover their illusion.

One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.

A kindly gesture bestowed by us on an animal arouses prodigies of understanding and gratitude.

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

I love my past, I love my present. I am not ashamed of what I have had, and I am not sad because I no longer have it.

By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.

I am indebted to the cat for a particular kind of honorable deceit, for a greater control over myself, for a characteristic aversion to brutal sounds, and for the need to keep silent for long periods of time.

Truffles must come to the table in their own stock and as you break open this jewel sprung from a poverty-stricken soil, imagine - if you have never visited it - the desolate kingdom where it rules.

Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either.

My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.

I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

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

Voluptuaries, consumed by their senses, always begin by flinging themselves with a great display of frenzy into an abyss. But they survive, they come to the surface again. And they develop a routine of the abyss: It's four o clock. At five I have my abyss ...

The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike.

The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives.

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

I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.

The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.

A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.

If we want to be sincere, we must admit that there is a well-nourished love and an ill-nourished love. And the rest is literature.

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.

By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet.

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.