Coco Chanel may not have said “always keep your head, heels and standards high” but she did mutter a lot of memorable and intriguing quotes during her lifetime.
In 1938, French Vogue magazine published 31 quotes by Coco Chanel. The article was published on pages 56 and 57 of the September 1938 edition of Vogue and is authored by Gabrielle Chanel herself (Gabrielle was Coco’s real name).
Chanel called the article Maximes et Sentences (meaning Maxims and Sentences), and she clearly meant that they were her maxims and sentences since you won’t find them anywhere else.
We’ve run these quotes through Google Translate to give a rough translation of the quotations, and we’ve added some numbers for ease of reference.
We think most of the Coco Chanel quotes are silly nonsense, but they are at least authentic.
Are these Chanel quotes timeless, trite, tripe or something in between?
You can make up your own mind about how much use they are to you by reading them for yourselves.
MAXIMS AND SENTENCES by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel
1. Women can give it all with a smile and take it all away with a tear.
2. Fashion is always a reflection of the times, but we forget it if it is stupid.
3. Dressing up is charming; dressing up is sad.
4. Feigning naivety makes you look dumber than admitting ignorance.
5. Coquetry is a conquest of the mind over the senses.
6. Finds are made to be lost.
7. Kindness is love; generosity, a form of passion.
8. Nature gives you your twenty-year-old face; life molds your face of thirty; but that of fifty years, it is for you to deserve it.
9. True generosity is to accept ingratitude.
10. If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing.
11. Adornment, what a science! Beauty, what a weapon! Modesty, what elegance!
12. Frugal wealth, pretentious ostentation, sordid liberalities, these are the surest weapons of the suicide of fortune.
13. We can love you despite great faults, but hate you for real qualities or great virtues.
14. You can only open barriers that you have closed yourself.
15. Failed innovation is painful; the reconstruction is sinister.
16. For a woman, betraying has only one meaning: precisely that of the senses.
17. Only truth knows no bounds.
18. Disgust is often the rearguard of pleasure, and often the vanguard.
19. “Good taste” destroys certain real values of the mind: simple taste, for example.
20. It is a moment when you can no longer touch a work: it is when it is at its worst.
21. One can be reduced to deceiving by an excess of delicacy in love.
22. Fashion is a queen and sometimes a slave.
23. The face is a mirror in which the movements of the inner life are reflected: give it a lot of care.
24. Since it is agreed that the eyes are the mirror of the soul, why not admit that the mouth is also the interpreter of the heart?
25. The only beautiful eyes are those that look at us tenderly.
26. The delicacy of the ear is not always related to that of the heart.
27. Through coquetry, even the course of time stops for women.
28. There are gestures of love and tenderness which have their source only in devotion.
29. Our homes are our prisons; let us know how to find freedom there in the way of adorning them.
30. You can get used to ugliness, never to negligence.
31. It is characteristic of a weak mind to boast of advantages which chance alone can give us.
Depending on your perspective, Coco has just imparted 31 pieces of sage advice or silly nonsense.
But whatever the answer, the quotes have lasted over 80 years. Timeless like Chanel perhaps?