Daily Inspiration Quote by Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Colette’s line lands like a silk glove with a hidden slap: the real offense in a room isn’t bad taste, it’s the refusal to taste anything at all. “A certain absence of ugliness” sounds polite, even hygienic - the kind of bourgeois virtue that keeps surfaces smooth and feelings unruffled. Colette turns that virtue into a vice. Ugliness, in her framing, has at least the decency to be legible: it declares a preference, a history, a person who chose something and lived with the consequences. The “absence” she targets is a vacuum disguised as refinement, the décor equivalent of a personality sanded down for social approval.

The subtext is aesthetic but also moral. Furnishing isn’t just about chairs; it’s about how people stage their lives. Colette, who wrote with an unsentimental eye about desire, domesticity, and performance, distrusts the kind of “nice” that functions as camouflage. A room curated to offend no one often signals a life curated the same way: risk-averse, status-conscious, emotionally upholstered. Ugliness can be honest, even intimate - a cracked vase kept for memory, a loud fabric that tells you who won an argument.

Context matters: Colette worked in a France negotiating modernity, consumption, and the pressures of respectability, especially for women. Her jab punctures the fantasy that good living equals safe living. Better a room with a few bad decisions than one designed to prove you never make any.