Top 60 Sidonie Gabrielle Colette Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

2. “Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

3. “Time spent with a cat is never wasted.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

4. “You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

5. “Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

6. “You don’t think before you do something foolish. You do your thinking afterwards.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

7. “Hope costs nothing.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

8. “I have found my voice again and the art of using it...”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

9. “No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

11. “Look for a long time at what pleases you, and a longer time at what pains you.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

13. “So now, whenever I despair, I no longer expect my end, but some bit of luck, some commonplace little miracle which, like a glittering link, will mend again the necklace of my days.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

14. “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.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

15. “We only do well the things we like doing.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

16. “The lovesick, the betrayed, and the jealous all smell alike.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

17. “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...”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

18. “Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

19. “When she raises her eyelids, it’s as if she were taking off all her clothes.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

21. “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.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

23. “Writing only leads to more writing.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

25. “There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

26. “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.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

27. “January, month of empty pockets! let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer’s forehead.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

28. “Never touch a butterfly’s wing with your finger.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

29. “Total absence of humor renders life impossible.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

33. “A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

34. “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.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

35. “There are no ordinary cats.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

36. “A few days later, I found my mother beneath the tree, motionless with excitement, her head turned toward the heavens in which she would allow human religions no place.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

37. “If I can’t have too many truffles, I’ll do without truffles.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

38. “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.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

39. “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

40. “Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

42. “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.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

43. “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.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

44. “Don’t cudgel your brains over my little problems.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

46. “It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

47. “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.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

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

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

50. “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.”

— Sidonie Gabrielle Colette