George Sand Quotes
There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.
Art for the sake of art itself is an idle sentence. Art for the sake of truth, for the sake of what is beautiful and good — that is the creed I seek.
Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age.
The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.
Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure.
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
Life is a long ache which rarely sleeps and can never be cured.
I have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession of writing is a violent and almost indestructible one.
Admiration and familiarity are strangers.
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.
The eye of the body is not always that of the soul.
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.
Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
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?
Let us accept truth, even when it surprises us and alters our views.
Women love always: when earth slips from them, they take refuge in heaven.
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 is happy as a result of one's own efforts once one knows 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.
Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.
Art is a demonstration of which nature is the proof.
We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.
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.
Vanity is the quicksand of reason.
Masterpieces are only lucky attempts.
In the stormy days of our youth, we imagine that solitude is a sure refuge from the assaults of life, a certain balm for the wounds of battle. This is a serious mistake, and experience teaches us that, if we cannot live in peace with our fellow-men, neither romantic raptures nor aesthetic enjoyment will ever fill the abyss gaping at the bottom of our hearts.
Can one thus resume one's self? Can one know one's self? Is one ever somebody? I don't know anything about it any more. It now seems to me that one changes from day to day and that every few years one becomes a new being.
