George Sand Quotes

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

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.

The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.

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

Discouragement seizes us only when we can no longer count on chance.

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

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.

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.

No religion can be built on force.

Years do not always make age.

I see upon their noble brows the seal of the Lord, for they were born kings of the earth far more truly than those who possess it only from having bought it.

a woman's heart has no wrinkles.

O heart! love is thy bane and thy antidote.

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

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

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

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.

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

Party politics is now a real farce.

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 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.

Not to love is to cease to live.

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

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.

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

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age.

...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.)