Youth is not the age to seduce, it’s the age to be seduced.
—Colette
In the matter of furnishing, I find a certain absence of ugliness far worse than ugliness.
—Colette
Topics: Home
There is nothing that gives more assurance than a mask.
—Colette
Music is love in search of a word.
—Colette
Topics: Music, One liners
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… “
—Colette
Topics: Despair
My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.
—Colette
Topics: Friends and Friendship
Don’t ever wear artistic jewelry; it wrecks a woman’s reputation.
—Colette
Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight. For it is the only suffering that we endure without ever becoming used to it.
—Colette
Topics: Jealousy
One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.
—Colette
Topics: Age, Aging
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.
—Colette
Topics: Animals
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.
—Colette
Topics: Crime
A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.
—Colette
Topics: Experience, Childhood
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.
—Colette
Topics: Suffering
The woman who thinks she is intelligent demands equal rights with men. A woman who is intelligent does not.
—Colette
Topics: Intellectuals, Intelligence
The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.
—Colette
Topics: Travel
Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.
—Colette
Topics: Smoking
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.
—Colette
Topics: The Past, Past
What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.
—Colette
Topics: Happiness, Life, Living, Blessings
Girls usually have a paper mache face on their wedding day.
—Colette
Topics: Weddings, Marriage
Can it be that chance has made me one of those women so immersed in one man that, whether they are barren or not, they carry with them to the grave the shriveled innocence of an old maid?
—Colette
It was on that road and at that hour that I first became aware of my own self, experienced an inexpressible state of grace, and felt one with the first breath of air that stirred, the first bird, and the sun so newly born that it still looked not quite round.
—Colette
Topics: Beginnings
January, month of empty pockets! Let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer’s forehead.
—Colette
Topics: Winter, Seasons
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.
—Colette
Topics: Appearance
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.
—Colette
Topics: Fashion
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.
—Colette
Topics: Absence
For to dream and then to return to reality only means that our qualms suffer a change of place and significance
—Colette
Topics: Dreams, Reality
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.
—Colette
Topics: Girls, Children
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.
—Colette
Topics: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
We only do well the things we like doing.
—Colette
Topics: Enjoyment, Aptness, Appropriateness, Success
There are no ordinary cats.
—Colette
Topics: Cats
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Francoise Sagan French Novelist
- Jules Verne French Novelist
- Alfred de Musset French Poet, Playwright
- Henri de Montherlant French Essayist, Novelist, Dramatist
- Jean Cocteau French Poet, Artist
- Andre Gide French Novelist
- Marquis de Sade French Writer
- Roland Barthes French Literary Theorist
- Arthur Rimbaud French Poet
- Simone de Beauvoir French Philosopher
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