George Sand Quotes

Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué.[Letter to Armand Barbès, 12 May 1867]

~ George Sand

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.

~ 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

J'ai un but, une tâche, disons le mot, une passion. Le métier d'écrire en est une violente et presque indestructible.[Letter to Jules Boucoiran, 4 March 1831]

~ George Sand

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

~ 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 warm, I am alive, I am calm and sad, I hardly know why. In this existence so even, so tranquil, and so gentle as I have here, I am in an element that weakens me morally while strengthening me physically; and I fall into melancholies of honey and roses which are none the less melancholy. It seems to me that all those I love forget me, and that it is justice, because I live a selfish life having nothing to do for any one of them.

~ George Sand

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

~ George Sand

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” 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

[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

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.

~ George Sand

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.

~ George Sand

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

~ George Sand

Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect

~ 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

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

~ George Sand

Faith is an excitement and an enthusiasm a state of intellectual magnificence which we must not squander on our way through life.

~ George Sand

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.

~ George Sand

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

~ George Sand

No human creature can give orders to love.

~ 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

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

~ George Sand

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

~ George Sand

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

~ 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

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 artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

~ 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