George Sand Quotations | Page 2

Gossiping is the plague of little towns.

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.

Our work can never be better than we are ourselves.

The publication of a book only brings very paltry results to its author.

... everyone's free to embark on either a great clipper or a little fishing boat. An artist is an explorer who oughtn't to shrink from anything: it doesn't matter whether he goes to the left or the right -- his goal sanctifies all.

Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves.

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!

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

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

... 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

...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.)

The lessons of experience are always learned too late.

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

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

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

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 ...

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 ...

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

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

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.

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

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 ...

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

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

honesty dies in selling itself.

the mind has no sex ...

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Not to love is to cease to live.

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

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.

When they are among us cats are angels

The capacity of passion is both cruel and divine

Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect

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

We must have a passion in life.

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.

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

a woman's heart has no wrinkles.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Years do not always make age.

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

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.

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.

Lying, like license, has its degrees.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

The intellect seeks, the heart finds.

It is love, not faith, that moves mountains.

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?

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.

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.

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

Love without reverence and enthusiasm is only friendship.

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.

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

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.