Colette Quotes
Most popular Colette Quotes
Be happy. It's one way of being wise.
Total absence of humor renders life impossible.
Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.
You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.
One keeps forgetting old age up to the very brink of the grave.
What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.
Jealousy is the only evil we endure without becoming accustomed to it.
With jealousy, one has no time to be bored, and hardly time to grow old.
Love comes disguised as a thunderbolt and often vanishes at the same pace.
It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship.
The seduction emanating from a person of uncertain or dissimulated sex is powerful.
It is prudent to pour the oil of delicate politeness upon the machinery of friendship.
When a man wants to deceive you, he'll find a way of escape through the tiniest of holes.
A kindly gesture bestowed by us on an animal arouses prodigies of understanding and gratitude.
A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.
Humility has its origin in an awareness of unworthiness, and sometimes too in a dazzled awareness of saintliness.
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.
There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.
Friendship, which is of its nature a delicate thing, fastidious, slow of growth, is easily checked, will hesitate, demur, recoil where love, good old blustering love, bowls ahead and blunders through every obstacle.
There are days when solitude, for someone of my age, is a heady wine which intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.
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.
