George Sand Quotes

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

“...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.)”

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

“No one makes a revolution by himself.”

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

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

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

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

“The mind has no sex.”

“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?”

“... 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.”

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

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

“The whole secret of the study of nature lies in learning how to use one's eyes.”

“Life is a succession of afflictions for the heart.”

“Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write”

“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.”

“honesty dies in selling itself.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”