George Sand Quotes

Our work can never be better than we are ourselves.

The intellect seeks, the heart finds.

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

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

The lessons of experience are always learned too late.

We must have a passion in life.

Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves.

A woman, when she is heroic, is not heroic by halves.

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.

Where love is absent there can be no woman.

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

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.

Weeds are omnipresent; errors are to be found in the heart of the most lovable.

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

Admiration and familiarity are strangers.

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

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

Masterpieces are only lucky attempts.

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.

O heart! love is thy bane and thy antidote.

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

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

It is love, not faith, that moves mountains.

A woman's heart has no wrinkles.

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

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

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

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.

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

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

The constant winds of petty appetite dissipate the power of response.

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

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

Almost all novels are love stories.

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

Not to love is to cease to live.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mind has no sex ...

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

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

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

Between genius and madness there is often not the thickness of a hair.

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

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

Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect

The capacity of passion is both cruel and divine

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

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

No religion can be built on force.

Sorrow makes us very good or very bad.

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.

When they are among us cats are angels

We have now all sorts of good reasons for accepting life, quite as good as those that had made us reject it the previous week.

The cigar is the perfect complement to an elegant lifestyle.

At the very time I should speak out I feel more than ever the impossibility of doing so.

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

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

The marriage vow is an absurdity imposed by society.

Celebrate within yourself that wonderful treasure ... true kindness.

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

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

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

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

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

Fame and admiration weigh not a feather in the scale against friendship and love, for the heart languishes all the same.

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

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

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

There is but on virtue
the eternal sacrifice of self.

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

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

[I]t is that we are too apt to despise what appears to be neither good nor beautiful, and thus we lose what is helpful and salutary.

Fretting at trouble only doubles it.

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

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.

Love without reverence and enthusiasm is only friendship.

I'm not sure that there's anything more horrible than staying in a furnished room in Paris, especially

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!

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

Life is a succession of afflictions for the heart.

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

I know that I have found fulfillment. I have an object in life, a task ... a passion.

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

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

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

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Years do not always make age.