George Sand Quotes

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

Love is too delicate a flower to rise again when one has trampled it under foot. ~ George Sand

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! ~ George Sand

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 ... ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

Weak people live in perpetual fear and foreboding. ~ George Sand

O heart! love is thy bane and thy antidote. ~ George Sand

Autumn is a melancholy and graceful andante, that prepares beautifully solemn adagio of winter ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

Many of them were familiar from childhood with the fables of La Fontaine. Or they had read Voltaire or Racine or Molière in English translations. But that was about the sum of any familiarity they had with French literature. And none, of course, could have known in advance that the 1830s and '40s in Paris were to mark the beginning of the great era of Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, and Baudelaire, not to say anything of Delacroix in painting or Chopin and Liszt in music. ~ David McCullough

Life isn't always easy but so long as we have hope that we will find someone to help us through the darkness things will always get better. When we find that person, life suddenly explodes and darkness turns into a riot of colour. We're always looking for someone, what we need to remember is that someone is out there looking for us too. ~ George Sand

… reason told me that wherever we are thrown on earth, no matter how false our position, no matter how debased those beings who surround us, our duty is to work to combat evil and allow good to triumph. ~ George Sand

Nature distributes her favors unequally. ~ George Sand

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

The prayers of a lover are more imperious than the menaces of the whole world. ~ George Sand

Our work can never be better than we are ourselves. ~ George Sand

Where love is absent there can be no woman. ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

No place is ugly to those who understand the virtues and sweetness of everything that God has made. ~ George Sand

And I refused to make any sacrifices; for nothing on earth seemed more valuable than my peace of mind, my pleasure and my acclaim. ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

In the early 1830s the writer George Sand, a woman, had a man's overcoat and a pair of boots made for her so she could have the same pleasure - to walk the streets of Paris free to look at whatever she liked. In her autobiography she writes: "I can't express the pleasure my boots gave me ... With those little iron-shot heels, I was on solid pavement. I flew from one end of Paris to the other. It seemed to me that I could go round the world. And then, my clothes feared nothing. I ran out in every kind of weather, I came home at every sort of hour ... No one paid any attention to me, and no one guessed at my disguise ... No one knew me, no one looked at me, no one found fault with me; I was an atom lost in that immense crowd. ~ Randon Billings Noble

It is love, not faith, that moves mountains. ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

A day will come when everything in my life will be changed, when I shall do good to others, when some one will love me, when I shall give my whole heart to the man whi gives ne his; neanwhile, U will suffer in silence and keep my love as a reward for him who shall set me free. ~ George Sand

What is there over which the incomparable beauty of childhood would not triumph? ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

The capacity of passion is both cruel and divine ~ George Sand

Like George Sand, the feminism of the present day asserts the right of free thought against the creed of authority in every field; the solidarity of mankind and the cause of peace against the patriotism of militarism; social reform against the existing relations of society. ~ Ellen Key

Love without reverence and enthusiasm is only friendship. ~ George Sand

If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity. ~ George Sand

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

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. ~ George Sand

We have now all sorts of good reasons for accepting life, quite as good as those that had made us reject it the previous week. ~ George Sand

Gossiping is the plague of little towns. ~ George Sand

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

[On Chopin's Preludes:]
His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky ... The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power. ~ George Sand

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

A woman's heart has no wrinkles. ~ George Sand

Vanity is the quicksand of reason. ~ George Sand

Between genius and madness there is often not the thickness of a hair. ~ George Sand

Vanity is the most despotic and iniquitous of masters, and I can never be the slave of my own vices. ~ George Sand

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 ~ George Sand

Learned women are ridiculed because they put to shame unlearned men. ~ George Sand

Fretting at trouble only doubles it. ~ George Sand

Nature alone can speak to our intelligence an imperishable language, never changing, because it remains within the bounds of eternal truth and of what is absolutely noble and beautiful. ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

The lessons of experience are always learned too late. ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

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

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it. ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

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

Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves. ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué."

("The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.")

[Letter to Armand Barbès, 12 May 1867] ~ George Sand

The smoke of glory is not worth the smoke of a pipe. ~ George Sand

Unrequited love is as different from the mutual love as the error from the truth. ~ George Sand

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

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

There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved. ~ George Sand

Faith is like love; when you want it you can't find it, and you find it when you least expect it. ~ George Sand

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

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

Once my heart was captured, reason was shown the door, deliberately and with a sort of frantic joy. I accepted everything, I believed everything, without struggle, without suffering, without regret, without false shame. How can one blush for what one adores? ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

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

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

And so, what of it all? What of me and my passions and personas, my great loves and failures of love, my writing, my politics? What of the clanging opinions, the endless queries as to the whys and wherefores of how I chose to conduct myself? In the end, there is but one answer to every question, whether it is spit at me or made as gentlest inquiry: I was I. ~ Elizabeth Berg

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. ~ George Sand

You must write for all those who are thirsty to read and who can enjoy a good reading. ~ George Sand

We must have a passion in life. ~ George Sand

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

The mind has no sex ... ~ George Sand

The whole secret of the study of nature lies in learning how to use one's eyes ... ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

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

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. ~ George Sand

One changes from day to day, and ... after a few years have passed one has completely altered. ~ George Sand

Time is always wanting to me, and I cannot meet with a single day when I am nut hurried along, driven to by wits'-end by urgent work, business to attent do or some service to render. ~ George Sand

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

A woman, when she is heroic, is not heroic by halves. ~ George Sand

Life is a succession of afflictions for the heart. ~ George Sand

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

The intellect seeks, the heart finds. ~ George Sand

The Dream Lover is a historical novel at once expansively researched yet intimately imagined. George Sand may be the ultimate Berg heroine. 'A life not lived in truth,' Berg writes, 'is a life forfeited.' In this latest work, Elizabeth Berg has poured her own great gifts and her own great heart into the story of a woman determined to refuse any such forfeiture, no matter the cost. ~ Leah Hager Cohen

No religion can be built on force. ~ George Sand

Indeed, nothing is further from realizing the pretension of the beautiful than an ill-arranged ball. So many things difficult to assemble are necessary that during an entire century perhaps only two are given that can satisfy the artist. There must be the right climate, locale, decoration, food and costumes. It must be a Spanish or Italian night, dark and moonless, because the moon, when it reigns in the sky, throws an influence of languor and melancholy over men that is reflected in all their sensations. It must be a fresh, airy night with stars shining feebly through the clouds. There must be large gardens whose intoxicating perfume penetrates the rooms in waves. The fragrance of orange trees and of the Constantinople rose are especially apt to develop exaltation of heart and mind. There must be light food, delicate wines, fruit of all climates, and flowers of all seasons. There must be a profusion of things rare and difficult to possess, because a ball should be a realization of the most voracious imaginations and the most capricious desires. One must understand one thing before giving a ball: rich, civilized human beings find pleasure only in the hope of the impossible. So one must approach the impossible as closely as one can. ~ George Sand

When a marriage for love is on the carpet; you must expect to waste time. But when it's a marriage of convenience between two people who have no whims and who know what they want; it's soon arranged. ~ George Sand

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. ~ George Sand

If people were not wicked I should not mind their being stupid; but, to our misfortune, they are both. ~ George Sand

Not to love is to cease to live. ~ George Sand

Travelling is like a novel: it's what happens that counts. ~ George Sand

It is extraordinary how music sends one back into memories of the past ... ~ George Sand

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life. ~ George Sand

When I tried to draw near, you dissolved into air before my lips could touch you ... ~ George Sand

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

You, stupid one, who believe in laws which punish murder by murder ... ~ George Sand

The constant winds of petty appetite dissipate the power of response. ~ George Sand