George Sand Quotes

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

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

The cigar is the perfect complement to an elegant lifestyle.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The intellect seeks, the heart finds.

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.

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?

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

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

If people were not wicked I should not mind their being stupid; but, to our misfortune, they are both.

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.

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?

There is only one sex. A man and a woman are so entirely the same thing that one can scarcely understand the subtle reasons for sex distinctions with which our minds are filled.

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

It is love, not faith, that moves mountains.

Love without reverence and enthusiasm is only friendship.

We must have a passion in life.

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.

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

One is happy as a result of one's own efforts, once one knows of 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. Happiness is no vague dream, of that I now feel certain.

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.

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.

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

A cigar numbs sorrow and fills the solitary hours with a million gracious images.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

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

Believe in no other God than the one who insists on justice and equality among men.

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

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.

A child motivated by competitive ideals will grow into a man without conscience, shame, or true dignity.

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

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.

The capacity for passion is both cruel and divine.

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.

I saw in 'the wandering Jew' the personification of the Jewish people, exiled in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, they are once again extremely rich, owing to their unfailing rude greediness and their indefatigable activity. With their hard-heartedness that they extend toward people of other faiths and races they are at the point of making themselves kings of the world. This people can thank its obstinacy that France will be Judized within fifty years. Already some wise Jews prophesy this frankly.

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.

Discouragement seizes us only when we can no longer count on chance.

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.

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

Lying, like license, has its degrees.

Not to love is to cease to live.