George Sand Quotations

There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.

Women love always: when earth slips from them, they take refuge in heaven.

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age.

Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.

Once my heart was captured, reason was shown the door, deliberately and with a sort of frantic joy. I accepted everything, I believed everything, without struggle, without suffering, without regret, without false shame. How can one blush for what one adores?

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.

We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.

Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness.

The prayers of a lover are more imperious than the menaces of the whole world

Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure.

One changes from day to day, and... after a few years have passed one has completely altered.

I see upon their noble brows the seal of the Lord, for they were born kings of the earth far more truly than those who possess it only from having bought it.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.

Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.

I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

No human creature can give orders to love.

The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.

One approaches the journey's end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe.

No one makes a revolution by himself; and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.

One is happy as a result of one's own efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience.

One is happy as a result of one's own efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience.

One changes from day to day, and...after a few years have passed one has completely altered.

There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.

It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides.

Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.

Anything we destroy in ourselves we destroy in others. Our falls lower others and throw them down; we owe it to our fellows to keep upright, in order that they too may keep their feet.

Love without reverence and enthusiasm is only friendship.

Let us accept truth, even when it surprises us and alters our views.

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one's talent, and one's inner happiness.

I'm beginning to believe that there are angels disguised as men who pass themselves off as such and who inhabit the earth for a while to console and lift up with them toward heaven the poor, exhausted and saddened souls who were ready to perish here below.

We must love stupid people better than ourselves; are they not the really unfortunate ones of this world? Do not people without taste and without ideal grow constantly weary, rejoicing in nothing, and being quite useless here below?

It is love, not faith, that moves mountains.

The intellect seeks, the heart finds.

I would rather believe that God did not exist than believe that he was indifferent.

I have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession of writing is a violent and almost indestructible one.

Ah! that Senate is a world of ice and darkness! It votes the destruction of peoples as the simplest and wisest thing; for its members themselves are moribund.

Humanity is outraged in me and with me. We must not dissimulate nor try to forget this indignation, which is one of the most passionate forms of love.

A man is not a wall, whose stones are crushed upon the road; or a pipe, whose fragments are thrown away at a street corner. The fragments of an intellect are always good.

The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.

I was born to love - but none of you wanted to believe it, and that misunderstanding was crucial in forming my character. It's true that nature was strangely inconsistent in giving me a warm heart, but also a face that was like a stone mask and a tongue that was heavy and slow. She refused me what she bestowed freely on even the most loutish of my fellow men. . . . People judged my inner character by my outer covering, and like a sterile fruit, I withered under the rough husk I couldn't slough off.

Lying, like license, has its degrees.

Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

Art belongs to all times and to all countries; its special benefit is precisely to be still living when everything else seems dying; that is why Providence shields it from too personal or too general passions, and grants it a patient and persevering organization, durable sensibility, and the contemplative sense in which lies invincible faith.

I'm not full of virtues and noble qualities. I love, but I love strongly, exclusive, stedfasty.

Years do not always make age.

Know how to replace in your heart, by the happiness of those you love, the happiness that may be wanting to yourself

Punctuation has its own philosophy, just as style does, although not as language does. Style is a good understanding of language, punctuation is a good understanding of style.

I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a thousand birds in the country, the movement of the ships on the waters. I love also absolute, profound silence, and, in short, I love everything that is around me, no matter where I am.

God has written in the law of nature that when two people are joined in love or friendship, one must always give his heart more perfectly than the other.

Whoever has loved knows all that life contains of sorrow and joy.

One wastes so much time, one is so prodigal of life, at twenty! Our days of winter count for double. That is the compensation of the old.

a woman's heart has no wrinkles.

These tears do me good, they have watered the parched place; perhaps my heart will grow again there!

God abandons only those who abandon themselves, and whoever has the courage to shut up his sorrow within his own heart is stronger to fight against it than he who complains.

We must have a passion in life.

Simplicity is the essence of the great, the true, and the beautiful in art.

Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect

The capacity of passion is both cruel and divine

When they are among us cats are angels

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.

The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning.

Not to love is to cease to live.

Unrequited love is as different from the mutual love as the error from the truth.

faith is like love; when you want it you can't find it, and you find it when you least expect it.

Where there is no longer love, there is no longer anything.

Experience is always a trustworthy guide; it may not tell you everything, but it never lies.

Immodest creature, you do not want a woman who will accept your faults, you want the one who pretends you are faultless - one who will caress the hand that strikes her and kiss the lips that lie to her.

I loved [fairy stories] so, and my mother weighed down by grief had given up telling me them. At Nohant I found Mmes. d'Ardony's and Perrault's tales in old editions which became my chief joy for five or six years ... I've never read them since, but I could tell each tale straight through, and I don't think anything in all one's intellecutal life can be compared to these delights of imagination.

There are no more thorough prudes than those who have some little secret to hide.

the mind has no sex ...

honesty dies in selling itself.

The more you lose the right to be jealous, the more so you become!

Writing a journal means that facing your ocean you are afraid to swim across it, so you attempt to drink it drop by drop.

We do not precisely enjoy liberty at the Figaro. M. de Latouche, our worthy director (ah! you should know the fellow), is always hanging over us, cutting, pruning, right or wrong, imposing upon us his whims, his aberrations, his fancies, and we have to write as he bids ...

The masses are still ungrateful or ignorant. They prefer murder, poisonings, and crimes generally to a literature possessed of style and feeling.

Life is a slate where all our sins are written; from time to time we rub the sponge of repentance over it so we can begin sinning again.

art speaks only to the mind, whereas nature speaks to all the faculties ...

You don't have to write to me if you don't feel like it. There's no real friendship without absolute freedom.

death must no longer be either the penalty for prosperity or the consolation of misery. God did not destine it to be either the punishment or the compensation for life ...

To eat together is one of the greatest promoters of intimacy. It is the satisfaction in common of a material necessity of existence, and if you seek a loftier meaning in it, it is a communion ...

You see what stupid folk my publishers are; but they are all alike.

Nowadays it seems that moral education is no longer considered necessary. Attention is wholly centered on intelligence, while the heart life is ignored.

Weakness is oftentimes so palpable as to be equivalent to wickedness.

The lessons of experience are always learned too late.

...Je n’ai pas cessé de l’être si c’est d’être jeune que d’aimer toujours !... L’humanité n’est pas un vain mot. Notre vie est faite d’amour, et ne plus aimer c’est ne plus vivre." (I have never ceased to be young, if being young is always loving... Humanity is not a vain word. Our life is made of love, and to love no longer is to live no longer.)

One never knows how much a family may grow; and when a hive is too full, and it is necessary to form a new swarm, each one thinks of carrying away his own honey.

You may impose silence upon me, but you can not prevent me from thinking.

It is always the best friends who are neglected and ignored.

It seems to me that the earth belongs to God who made it and entrusted it to men as a perpetual home. But it cannot have been part of His plan that some men should be ill with overfeeding and that others should die of starvation. No matter what anyone can say they cannot prevent me from feeling sad and angry when I see a beggar crying at a rich man's door.

living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions - no, one shouldn't do it.

No human being can control love, and no one is to blame either for feeling it or for losing it. What alone degrades a woman is falsehood.

... what is there over which the incomparable beauty of childhood would not triumph?

... the progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it.

Simplicity, a delicate silence about oneself, increases their worth and makes one love those whom one admires.

... love is too delicate a flower to rise again when one has trampled it under foot.

To be made evident, truth must be sought for; for of itself it is slow to appear, and between ourselves and God the obstacles are so many!