Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Quotes - Page 3

I've entered the world of wine without any professional training, but a definite appetite for good bottles.

Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either.

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?

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

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.

At sixty-three years of age, less a quarter, one still has plans.

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

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

That lovely voice; how I should weep for joy if I could hear it now!

The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.

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

A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.

Don't cudgel your brains over my little problems.

Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight.

You don't think before you do something foolish. You do your thinking afterwards.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The word 'pure' has never revealed an intelligent meaning to me. I can only use the word to quench an optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it - in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.

At the top of the iron staircase leading to the stage, the good, dry, dusty warmth wraps me round like a comfortable dirty cloak.

Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.

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.