An ever-evolving catalog of my favorite quotations!
ART + DESIGN
“Good design is forever.” –Van Day Truex
“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.” -Claude Monet
“Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.” -Claude Monet
“Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.” -Pablo Picasso
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” -Pablo Picasso
“I never wanted to be a painter. I wanted to be a tap dancer.” -Andy Warhol
“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” -Federico Fellini
“A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it.” -Irving Penn
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” -Leonardo DaVinci
“Suitability, simplicity, and proportion.” -Elsie de Wolfe
BEAUTY
“I feel that beauty and femininity are ageless.” – Marilyn Monroe
“There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.” -Helena Rubinstein
“Girls look beautiful when they feel beautiful.” -Jenna Lyons
“Sometimes at parties I slip away to the bathroom just to see what colognes they’ve got.” -Andy Warhol
“If you don’t wear lipstick, I can’t talk to you.” -Isabella Blow
“Each time I would clamber out to silk stockings and perfume. Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.” -June, Henry and June
“Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest.” – Christian Dior
“A woman’s perfume tells more about her than her handwriting.” -Christian Dior
”Long after one has forgotten what a woman wore, the memory of her perfume lingers.” -Christian Dior
“A woman that doesn’t wear perfume has no future.” -Coco Chanel
“Wear perfume wherever you want to be kissed.” -Coco Chanel
“I think hairstyle is the final tip-off whether or not a woman really knows herself.” -Hubert de Givenchy
“Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.” -Gwyneth Paltrow
“The world loves glamour, it needs glamour.” -Gloria Guinness
“Beauty is whatever gives joy.” -Edna St. Vincent Millay
“You must do something to make your world more beautiful.” -Miss Rumphius
“I am going to make everything around me beautiful. That will be my life.” -Elsie de Wolfe
“Beauty is everywhere a welcome guest.” -Goethe
“Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.” -Anne Lamott
BOOKS, READING + WRITING
“My mother was right. When you’ve got nothing left all you can do is get into some silk underwear and start reading Proust.” -Jane Birkin
“The best decoration in the world is a room full of books.” -Billy Baldwin
“The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.” -Joan Didion
“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?” -Oscar Wilde
“What really knocks me out is a book, when you’re all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” -Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye
“The bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.” -Christopher Morley
“Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.” -P.J. O’Rourke
“Or don’t you like to write letters. I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working yet feel you’ve done something.” -Ernest Hemingway
“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.” -Anna Quindlen
“Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled, ‘This could change your life.’” -Helen Exley
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.” -Oscar Wilde
“I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.” -Woody Allen
“You deserve a longer letter than this; but it is my unhappy fate seldom to treat people so well as they deserve.” -Jane Austen
CURIOSITY + INSPIRATION
“My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.” -Anais Nin
“Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive—it’s such an interesting world.” -Anne of Green Gables
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” -Albert Einstein
“The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” -Marcel Proust
“Find something you’re interested in and keep tremendously interested in it.” -Julia Child
“But above all, watch, with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.” -Roald Dahl
“Imagination is the highest kite one can fly.” – Lauren Bacall
DREAMING BIG
“How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something, but to be someone.” -Coco Chanel
“No father, the moon is reaching for me.” -Audrey Hepburn, Sabrina
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” -George Eliot
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.” -Oscar Wilde
“Living on nothing but a young girl’s dreams, with my cowboy boots and my old six-string.” -Mary Chapin Carpenter
“Everybody must have a fantasy.” -Andy Warhol
“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?” –F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Hitch your wagon to a star.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I’m gonna be something one of these days.” -Patsy Cline
“You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.” -Oprah Winfrey
“What we have here is a dreamer.” -The Virgin Suicides
“All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers.” -Orison Swett Marden
“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” -Lewis Carroll
“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” -Abraham Lincoln
“May you live all the days of your life.” -Jonathan Swift
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” -Anaïs Nin
ENTERTAINING, FOOD + DRINK
“I was thirty-two when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.” -Julia Child
“A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.” -Elsa Schiaparelli
“There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” -Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
“Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.” -Alice Walker
“It was as delightful visit—perfect, in being much too short.” -Emma, Jane Austen
“I don’t think I’ve ever drunk champagne before breakfast before. With breakfast on several occasions, but never before, before.” -Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
“Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.” – Ogden Nash
“I cook with wine; sometimes I even add it to the food.” – W. C. Fields
“One mint julep was the cause of it all…” – Ray Charles
“My nerves could use a drink.” – Grace Kelly, To Catch a Thief
“What you eat standing up doesn’t count.” -Beth Barnes
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” -T.S. Eliot
“People who eat white bread have no dreams.” -Diana Vreeland
“After eating chocolate you feel godlike, as though you can conquer enemies, lead armies, entice lovers.” -Emily Luchetti
“No party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.” -Desiderius Erasmus
“Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast.” -William Shakespeare
“There was a faint spray of champagne on her breath.” -F.Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
ETIQUETTE + ELEGANCE
“You must never confuse elegance with snobbery.” -Yves Saint Laurent
“Be pretty if you can, be witty if you must, be gracious if it kills you.” -Elsie de Wolfe
“Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Good manners are never passe.” -Slim Aarons
“A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous.” -Coco Chanel
“Elegance is refusal.” -Coco Chanel
“Elegance is good taste plus a dash of daring.” -Carmel Snow
“Life is all about manners. Nothing else matters.” -Albert Hadley
“The only real elegance is in the mind; if you’ve got that, the rest really comes from it.” -Diana Vreeland
“Charm is a glow within a woman that casts a most becoming light on others.” -John Mason Brown
“Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use.” -Emily Post
FASHION + STYLE
“I think that playing dress-up begins at age five and never truly ends.” -Kate Spade
“Be faithful to your own taste because nothing you really like is ever out of style.” -Billy Baldwin
“You can have anything you want in life if you dress for it.” -Edith Head
“When you think about it department stores are kind of like museums.” -Andy Warhol
“Blue jeans are the most beautiful thing since the gondola.” -Diana Vreeland
“Dressing is a way of life.” -Yves Saint Laurent
“Fashion fades, style is eternal.” -Yves Saint Laurent
“The tones of gray, pale turquoise and pink will prevail.” -Christian Dior
“You gotta have style. It helps you get up in the morning.” -Diana Vreeland
“Well, if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to wear the proper clothes.” -Grace Kelly, Rear Window
“It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor’s finger.” -Andy Warhol
“Jewelry takes people’s minds off your wrinkles.” -Sonja Henie
“Big girls need big diamonds.” -Elizabeth Taylor
“Next to sound judgment, diamonds and pearls are the rarest things in the world.” -Jean de la Bruyère
“When I was four I asked my mother for a valet for my birthday.” -Karl Lagerfeld
“Style is primarily a matter of instinct.” -Bill Blass
“Fashion is architecture. It is a matter of proportions.” -Coco Chanel
“I’d rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.” -Emma Goldman
“When in doubt, wear red.” -Bill Blass
“People say she’s crazy, She’s got diamonds on the soles of her shoes.” -Paul Simon
“I’m nothing to look at, so the only thing I can do is dress better than anyone else.” -Wallis Simpson
“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” -Mark Twain
“You’re considered superficial and silly if you are interested in fashion, but I think you can be substantial and still be interested in frivolity.” -Sofia Coppola
“You put high heels on and you change.” -Manolo Blahnik
“I don’t design clothes, I design dreams.” -Ralph Lauren
FINER THINGS
“All I want is the best of everything and there’s very little of that left.” -Cecil Beaton
“I am easily satisfied with the very best.” -Winston Churchill
“Living well is the best revenge.” -George Herbert
“Living well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not.” -Oscar Wilde
“There are people who have money and people who are rich.” -Coco Chanel
“I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” -Oscar Wilde
FRIENDSHIP
“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.” -Virginia Woolf
“It is the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.” -Marlene Dietrich
“True friends stab you in the front.” -Oscar Wilde
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.” -Anäis Nin
“I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.” -Thomas A. Edison
“Treat your friends as you do your best pictures, and place them in their best light.” -Jennie Jerome Churchill
“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’” -C.S.Lewis
“There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self, the very meaning of one’s soul.” -Edith Wharton
GLAMOUR + PIZAZZ
“A person with real flair is a gambler at heart.” -Billy Baldwin
“Glamour is what I sell, it’s my stock in trade.” -Marlene Dietrich
“It’s got to have flair.” -Fleur Cowles
“Let’s give ‘em the old pizazz!” -Funny Face
“Something about glamour interested me. All my schoolbooks had drawings of women on terraces with a cocktail and a cigarette.” -Bill Blass
“Every girl on every page of Quality has grace, elegance, and pizazz. Now what’s wrong with bringing out a girl who has character, spirit, and intelligence?” -Funny Face
HAPPINESS + LAUGHTER
“Be happy. It’s one way of being wise.” -Colette
“Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.” -Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Did I tell you how divinely and utterly happy I am?” -Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
“I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out my nose.” -Woody Allen
“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter. “ -e.e. cummings
“Earth laughs in flowers.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it’s the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It’s probably the most important thing in a person.” -Audrey Hepburn
“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner. “ -Colette
“Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Life itself is the proper binge.” -Julia Child
“I think it’s nice to say the word ‘pom-pom’ as often as you can.” -Maira Kalman
HOME + INTERIOR DESIGN
“There’s no place like home.” -The Wizard of Oz
“I believe in plenty of optimism and white paint.” -Elsie de Wolfe
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” -William Morris
“An interior is a projection of the soul.” -Coco Chanel
“The best decoration in the world is a room full of books.” -Billy Baldwin
“Life is too short to sleep on low thread-count sheets.” -Leah Stussy
“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” -Virginia Woolf
“Live in rooms full of light.” -Cornelius Celsus
“The home should be the treasure chest of living.” -Le Corbusier
“Decorating is not a look, it’s a point of view.” -Albert Hadley
“It’s not the houses I love, it’s the life I live in them.” -Coco Chanel
“I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.” -Abraham Lincoln
“Home, the spot of earth supremely blest, A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest.” -Robert Montgomery
“Where thou art — that — is Home.” -Emily Dickinson
“There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.” -Jane Austen
“Innovation is often the ability to reach into the past and bring back what is good, what is beautiful, what is useful, what is lasting.” -Sister Parish
“I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.” -Anna Quindlen
INDIVIDUALITY
“You were born an original. Don’t die a copy.” -John Mason
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” -e.e. cummings
“I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.” -Lauren Bacall
“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.” -Coco Chanel
“Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.” -Cecil Beaton
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.” -Allen Ginsberg
KINDNESS
“When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.” -Abraham Joshua Heschel
“As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.” -Audrey Hepburn
“Life is short but there is always time for courtesy.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” -Henry James
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” -Maya Angelou
LOVE + COURTSHIP
“A gentleman is simply a patient wolf.” -Lana Turner
“When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. “ -Billy Crystal, When Harry Met Sally
“A woman happily in love, she burns the souffle. A woman unhappily in love, she forgets to turn on the oven.” -Sabrina
“We loved with a love that was more than love.” -Edgar Allan Poe
“Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold.” -Zelda Fitzgerald
“I have spread my dreams beneath your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” -W.B. Yeats
“I don’t pretend to be an ordinary housewife.” -Elizabeth Taylor
“I’ll tell you one thing, Fred, darling… I’d marry you for your money in a minute. Would you marry me for my money? -Holly Golightly
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” -Casablanca
“I want you to wear me, like a watch—charm or a button home bouquet—to the world.” -Zelda to F.Scott Fitzgerald
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” -Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
“I have decided to stick to love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
“To attract men, I wear a perfume called ‘New Car Interior.’” -Rita Rudner
“To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.” – Jane Austen
“You are always new, The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest.” -John Keats
“Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.” -Robert Frost
“Please send me your last pair of shoes, worn out with dancing as you mentioned in your letter, so that I might have something to press against my heart.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“I’m looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love. And I don’t think that love is here in this expensive suite in this lovely hotel in Paris.” -Carrie Bradshaw
“We could be happy anywhere as long as we’re together.” -Meet Me in St. Louis
“Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“Be of love a little more careful than anything.” -e.e. cummings
“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.” -Albert Einstein
“I was born with an enormous need for affection and a terrible need to give it.” -Audrey Hepburn
“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.” -Dr. Seuss
“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.” -Winnie the Pooh
“I can resist everything except temptation.” -Oscar Wilde
OPTIMISM
“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.” -Henri Matisse
“Direct your feet to the sunny side of the street…” -Dorothy Fields
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.” -Abraham Lincoln
“Today is a new day without any mistakes in it.” -Anne of Green Gables
PETS
“Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.” -Colette
“Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.“ -George Eliot
“My little dog – a heartbeat at my feet.” -Edith Wharton
SEASONS + WEATHER
“Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” -Henry James
“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” -Charles Dickens
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.” -Albert Camus
“To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon the verdure is the most perfect refreshment.” -Jane Austen
“Wisdom comes with winters.” -Oscar Wilde
“It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.” -P.D.James
STRUGGLES
“Flowers grow out of dark moments.” -Corita Kent
“However bad things are for me I always find someone who will buy me champagne.” -June, Henry and June
“You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.” Colette
“Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.” -Sophia Loren
“If you want the rainbow you’ve got to put up with the rain.” -Dolly Parton
“Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.” -Coco Chanel
“I am frivolous. Then I feel guilty.” -Catherine Deneuve
“I feel there is an angel inside me whom I am constantly shocking.” -Jean Cocteau
“If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun.” -Katharine Hepburn
“Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.” -Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.” -Oscar Wilde
“A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.” -Charlotte Brontë
SUCCESS + DETERMINATION
“80% of success is showing up.” -Woody Allen
“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.” -Robert Louis Stevenson
“I am a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” -Thomas Jefferson
“The only sin is mediocrity.” -Nancy Graham
“I only want people around me who can do the impossible.” -Elizabeth Arden
“Whatever you are, be a good one.” -Abraham Lincoln
“Nothing will work unless you do.” -Maya Angelou
“I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.” -Gustave Flaubert
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” -Annie Dillard
TRAVEL + DESTINATIONS
“Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go. “ -Truman Capote
“There’s such a lot of world to see.” -Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
“When good Americans die they go to Paris.” -Oscar Wilde
“America is my country and Paris is my hometown.” -Gertrude Stein
“The leaves are green on the trees in Paris now. I will be home in two months and look you in the eyes.” -Allen Ginsberg
“When I dream of afterlife in heaven, the action always takes place at the Ritz Paris.” -Hemingway
“Oh, but Paris isn’t for changing planes, it’s for changing your outlook! For throwing open the windows and letting in…la vie en rose.” – Audrey Hepburn, Sabrina
“I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it – overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.” -The Great Gatsby
“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” -Robert Louis Stevenson
“San Francisco is perhaps the most European of all American cities.” -Cecil Beaton
“When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” -Susan Heller
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” –Ernest Hemingway
“The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.” -Colette
“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” -Lin Yutang
“Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.” -Oscar Wilde
WOMANHOOD + FEMININITY
“Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.” -Marilyn Monroe
“I believe in pink…I believe in kissing…and I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls.” -Audrey Hepburn
“I feel that beauty and femininity are ageless.” – Marilyn Monroe
“Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Oh, I’m such an unholy mess of a girl.” -Katharine Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story
“There comes a time in every woman’s life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne.” -Bette Davis
“A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
“A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.” – Robert Frost
“You don’t know a woman until you have had a letter from her.” -Ada Leverson
“My idea of superwoman is someone who scrubs her own floors.” -Bette Midler
“A young woman has young claws, well sharpened. If she has character, that is. And if she hasn’t so much the worse for you.” -Henri Matisse
“A woman must have money and a room of her own.” -Virginia Woolf
“I’ve worked hard, and I’ve made a fortune, and I did it in a man’s world, but always, ruthlessly, and with a kind of cruel insistence, I have tried to keep feminine.” -Fleur Cowles
“Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.” -Sophia Loren
”If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.” -Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye
Questions or suggestions…? Email me: katie@theneotraditionalist.com
