George Sand Quotes & Sayings

Almost all novels are love stories. — George Sand

When we are misunderstood it is always our own fault. What the reader wants most of all is to be able to grasp what we think; but you loftily refuse to comply. — George Sand

A child motivated by competitive ideals will grow into a man without conscience, shame, or true dignity. — George Sand

Age continually alters the faces of those who think or study, and so their portraits differ from one another and don't even resemble them for very long. I dream so much and live so little that I'm sometimes only three years old. But the next day I'm three hundred, if the dream has been sombre. — George Sand

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. — George Sand

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

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. — George Sand

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

Women love always: when earth slips from them, they take refuge in heaven. — George Sand

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

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. — George Sand

Be prudent, and if you hear, * * * some insult or some threat, * * * have the appearance of not hearing it. — 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

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

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. — 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

Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect — George Sand

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

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

We must have a passion in life. — 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

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

Fretting at trouble only doubles it. — 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

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

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

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? — George Sand

Then she had doubts about the reality of her situation and wondered if her imminent departure was not the illusion of a dream. — George Sand

Vanity is the quicksand of reason. — George Sand

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weakness is oftentimes so palpable as to be equivalent to wickedness. — George Sand

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

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

Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness. — George Sand

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

At the very time I should speak out I feel more than ever the impossibility of doing so. — George Sand

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

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

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

I don't know why, but any thought of the future upsets me intolerably. So I had to turn and look back at certain aspects of the past, and only then did I recover my calm. I thought of our friendship and was overcome by guilt at having allowed so much bitterness to invade my wretched heart. I recalled the joys and sorrows we had shared. Both are so dear to me that I began to sob like a woman when I remembered them. — George Sand

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

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

When they are among us cats are angels — George Sand

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

[I]t is that we are too apt to despise what appears to be neither good nor beautiful, and thus we lose what is helpful and salutary. — 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

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

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

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. — George Sand

The mind has no sex ... — George Sand

The contemplation of Mont Blanc's unchanging summits for three or four days last month, the sight of that eternal snow, immaculate, sublime in its whiteness and calm, was enough to restore to my soul a serenity it had not known for a long time. — George Sand

Admiration and familiarity are strangers. — George Sand

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

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. — George Sand

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

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. — George Sand

Art belongs to all times and to all countries; its special benefit is precisely to be still living when everything else seems dying; that is why Providence shields it from too personal or too general passions, and grants it a patient and persevering organization, durable sensibility, and the contemplative sense in which lies invincible faith. — George Sand

The prayers of a lover are more imperious than the menaces of the whole world. — 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

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life. — 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

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

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

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

All your trouble comes from lack of exercise. A man of your strength and constitution ought always to have kept physically active. So don't jibe at the very wise advice that sentences you to one hour's walk a day. You imagine the work of the mind takes place only in the brain; but you're much mistaken. It takes place in the legs as well. — George Sand

Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it. — George Sand

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

As far as I am concerned I would rather spend the rest of my life in prison than marry again. — George Sand

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

Writing a journal means that facing your ocean you are afraid to swim across it, so you attempt to drink it drop by drop. — George Sand

In times when evil comes because men misunderstand and hate one another, it is the mission of the artist to praise sweetness, confidence, and friendship, and so to remind men, hardened or discouraged, that pure morals, tender sentiments, and primitive justice still exist, or at least can exist, in this world. — George Sand

It is high time that we had lights that are not incendiary torches. — George Sand

I know that I have found fulfillment. I have an object in life, a task ... a passion. — George Sand

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

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. — George Sand

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

Lying, like license, has its degrees. — George Sand

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

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

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

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

Masterpieces are only lucky attempts. — George Sand

Gossiping is the plague of little towns. — 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

The marriage vow is an absurdity imposed by society. — George Sand

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

We do not die of anguish, we live on. We continue to suffer. We drink the cup drop by drop. — George Sand

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

No human creature can give orders to love. — George Sand