George Sand

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

“O heart! love is thy bane and thy antidote.”

“Ever since time began the world has seemed stupid to those who aren't stupid themselves. It was to avoid that annoyance that I became stupid myself, as fast as ever I could. Sheer egoism, no doubt.”

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

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

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

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

“Vanity is the quicksand of reason.”

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

“almost all novels are love stories.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Love without reverence and enthusiasm is only friendship.”

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

“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.”

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

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Wikis give us a place where anyone who is kind, thoughtful and intelligent can come and join us in building a better and more rational world. Jimmy Wales Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Humanity is outraged in me and with me.”

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

“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.”

“Nature distributes her favors unequally.”

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

“Young love needs dangers and barriers to nourish it.”

“Admiration and familiarity are strangers.”

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

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

“My strength has not equaled my mad ambition. I have remained obscure; I have done worse -- I have touched success, and allowed it to escape me.”

“[Failure is hard initially because] One knows what one has lost, but not what one may find [and learn from that failure]!”

“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.”

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

“We must have a passion in life.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“No one makes a revolution by himself.”

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

“Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.”

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

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

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

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