George Sand Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Young love needs dangers and barriers to nourish it.

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

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

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.

Nature distributes her favors unequally.

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.

Not to love is to cease to live.

Where love is absent there can be no woman.

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

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.

Gossiping is the plague of little towns.

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.

Love without reverence and enthusiasm is only friendship.

O heart! love is thy bane and thy antidote.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

No human creature can give orders to love.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.

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

Humanity is outraged in me and with me.

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

Years do not always make age.

The marriage vow is an absurdity imposed by society.

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.

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.

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

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.

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.

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.

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.

We must have a passion in life.

The intellect seeks, the heart finds.

Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.

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

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.

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.

It is quite wrong to think of old age as a downward slope. On the contrary, one climbs higher and higher with the ad-vancing years, and that, too with sur-prising strides. Brain-work comes as easily to the old as physical exertion to the child. One is moving, it is true, towards the end of life, but that end is now a goal, and not a reef in which the vessel may be dashed.

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

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

honesty dies in selling itself.

I regard as a mortal sin not only the lying of the senses in matters of love, but also the illusion which the senses seek to create where love is only partial. I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity.