123 Astute Quotes by George Sand

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

Unrequited love differs from mutual love, just like delusion differs from the truth.

Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.

When they are among us cats are angels.

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

Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

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

Almost all novels are love stories.

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

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

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it, and by no means in the way the future keeps its promises.

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

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

Let us see a true-hearted man crushing that vermin called vice, braving that luxury, scorning with easy and simple logic the silly vanity which induces men to appear strong in absurdity and powerful in the abuse of life ... such vanity is always punished by nature, which vindicates its rights.

Do not exhaust yourself by efforts to trace back to original causes. Better accept them as inevitable and save your strength to fight against the effects.

No one makes a revolution by himself.

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

Immodest creature, you do not want a woman who will accept your faults, you want the one who pretends you are faultless -- one who will caress the hand that strikes her and kiss the lips that lie to her.

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

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

Party politics is now a real farce.

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

A cigar numbs sorrow and fills the solitary hours with a million gracious images.

But it's different with a woman. Her work in the house is to keep not to get.

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.

I'm not full of virtues and noble qualities. I love, but I love strongly, exclusive, stedfasty.

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

Masterpieces are only lucky attempts.

Humanity is outraged in me and with me.

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

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

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

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

Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

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

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

Weakness is oftentimes so palpable as to be equivalent to wickedness.

A woman's heart has no wrinkles.

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

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.

O heart! love is thy bane and thy antidote.

Living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions -- no, one shouldn't do it.

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!

Fretting at trouble only doubles it.

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

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

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

When mental illness increases until it reaches the danger point, do not exhaust yourself by efforts to trace back to original causes. Better accept them as inevitable and save your strength to fight against the effects.

Believe in no other God than the one who insists on justice and equality among men.

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

The marriage vow is an absurdity imposed by society.

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.

I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being.

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

Experience is always a trustworthy guide; it may not tell you everything, but it never lies.

It is love, not faith, that moves mountains.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Nature has not changed. The night is still unsullied, the stars still twinkle, and the wild thyme smells as sweetly now as it did then ... We may be afflicted and unhappy, but no one can take from us the sweet delight which is nature's gift to those who love her and her poetry.

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.

Young love needs dangers and barriers to nourish it.

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.

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

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

Gossiping is the plague of little towns.

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

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

Talent, will and genius are natural phenomena like the lake, the volcano, the mountain, the wind, the star, the cloud.

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

Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves.

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.

Heavens! whatever possesses us, here below, that we mutually torment ourselves, sourly reproach our mutual faults, and mercilessly condemn all that is not cut according to our pattern?

To eat together is one of the greatest promoters of intimacy. It is the satisfaction in common of a material necessity of existence, and if you seek a loftier meaning in it, it is a communion.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There is but on virtue -- the eternal sacrifice of self.

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.

It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides.

I'm beginning to believe that there are angels disguised as men who pass themselves off as such and who inhabit the earth for a while to console and lift up with them toward heaven the poor, exhausted and saddened souls who were ready to perish here below.

The cigar is the perfect complement to an elegant lifestyle.

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

The most honest of men is the one who thinks and acts best, but the most powerful is the one who writes and speaks best.

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

God abandons only those who abandon themselves, and whoever has the courage to shut up his sorrow within his own heart is stronger to fight against it than he who complains.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.

No human creature can give orders to love.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Admiration and familiarity are strangers.