George Sand

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
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

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

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

Admiration and familiarity are strangers.
George Sand

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

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

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

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

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

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.
George Sand

Every historian discloses a new horizon.
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

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

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

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

Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm: it is a condition of intellectual magnificence to which we must cling as to a treasure, and not squander on our way through life in the small coin of empty words, or in exact and priggish argument.
George Sand

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

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

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
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

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.
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

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

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

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

No human creature can give orders to love.
George Sand

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

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

I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.
George Sand