George sand quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

As far as I am concerned I would rather spend the rest of my life in prison than marry again.

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.

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

Young love needs dangers and barriers to nourish it.

Talent, will and genius are natural phenomena like the lake, the volcano, the mountain, the wind, the star, the cloud.

I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being.

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.

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

No place is ugly to those who understand the virtues and sweetness of everything that God has made.

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.

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

Life is a succession of afflictions for the heart.

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

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

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

Vanity is the most despotic and iniquitous of masters, and I can never be the slave of my own vices.

honesty dies in selling itself.

Not to love is to cease to live.

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

Age continually alters the faces of those who think or study, and so their portraits differ from one another and don't even resemble them for very long. I dream so much and live so little that I'm sometimes only three years old. But the next day I'm three hundred, if the dream has been sombre.

When mental sickness increases until it reaches the danger point, do not exhaust yourself by efforts to trace back to original causes. Better accept them as inevitable and save your strength to fight against the effects.

Some say that cats are devils, but they behave badly only when they are alone. When they are among us cats are angels.

Nature distributes her favors unequally.

Travelling is like a novel: it's what happens that counts.

Genius, whether locked up in a cell or roaming at large, is always solitary.

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

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.

Party politics is now a real farce.

You can bind my body, tie my hands, govern my actions: you are the strongest, and society adds to your power; but with my will, sir, you can do nothing.

Lying, like license, has its degrees.

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.

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

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

It is high time that we had lights that are not incendiary torches.

Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect

We must have a passion in life.

Sex is the most respectable and holy thing in all creation, the most serious act in life.

a woman's heart has no wrinkles.

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

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

The brain is a tool that gets rusty without constant, albeit moderate, exercise.

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.

The capacity for passion is both cruel and divine.

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

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

A day will come when everything in my life will be changed, when I shall do good to others, when some one will love me, when I shall give my whole heart to the man whi gives ne his; neanwhile, U will suffer in silence and keep my love as a reward for him who shall set me free.

Gossiping is the plague of little towns.

fretting at trouble only doubles it.

It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one's strength and one's days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wring from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day's work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil.

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'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 life of great geniuses is nothing but a sublime storm.

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

All your trouble comes from lack of exercise. A man of your strength and constitution ought always to have kept physically active. So don't jibe at the very wise advice that sentences you to one hour's walk a day. You imagine the work of the mind takes place only in the brain; but you're much mistaken. It takes place in the legs as well.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

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

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.

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.

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.

The lessons of experience are always learned too late.

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.

Admiration and familiarity are strangers.

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?

... when we are misunderstood it is always our own fault. What the reader wants most of all is to be able to grasp what we think; but you loftily refuse to comply.

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.

The intellect seeks, the heart finds.

The smoke of glory is not worth the smoke of a pipe.

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

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

No human creature can give orders to love.

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

we do not die of anguish, we live on. We continue to suffer. We drink the cup drop by drop.

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.

Life isn't always easy but so long as we have hope that we will find someone to help us through the darkness things will always get better. When we find that person, life suddenly explodes and darkness turns into a riot of colour. We're always looking for someone, what we need to remember is that someone is out there looking for us too.

Learned women are ridiculed because they put to shame unlearned men.

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

It is love, not faith, that moves mountains.

Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves.

It is extraordinary how music sends one back into memories of the past.

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.

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

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

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

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

You, stupid one, who believe in laws which punish murder by murder...

The most honest of men is the one who thinks and acts best, but the most powerful is the one who writes and speaks best.

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

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

To forgive a fault in another is more sublime than to be faultless one's self.

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

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.

O heart! love is thy bane and thy antidote.

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

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

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

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.

Heavens! whatever possesses us, here below, that we mutually torment ourselves, sourly reproach our mutual faults, and mercilessly condemn all that is not cut according to our pattern?

Be prudent, and if you hear, * * * some insult or some threat, * * * have the appearance of not hearing it.

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.

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

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?

Sorrow makes us very good or very bad.

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.

I needn't tell you that success and failure prove nothing - the whole thing is a lottery. It's pleasant to succeed; but for a philosophic mind it oughtn't to be very upsetting to fail.

Years do not always make age.

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.

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.

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

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

Love without reverence and enthusiasm is only friendship.

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.

nature has not changed. The night is still unsullied, the stars still twinkle, and the wild thyme smells as sweetly now as it did then ... We may be afflicted and unhappy, but no one can take from us the sweet delight which is nature's gift to those who love her and her poetry.

When I tried to draw near, you dissolved into air before my lips could touch you...

When they are among us cats are angels

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

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

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

Masterpieces are only lucky attempts.

And I refused to make any sacrifices; for nothing on earth seemed more valuable than my peace of mind, my pleasure and my acclaim.

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