George Sand

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

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

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

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

“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”

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

“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.”

“Vanity is the quicksand of reason.”

“Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.”

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

“Let us leave political questions to be decided by the powers concerned," Sir Ralph would say, "as we have adopted a form of government which forbids us to discuss our interests ourselves. If a nation is responsible for the faults of its legislature, what one can you find that is guiltier than yours?”

“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.”

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

“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”

“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.”

“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]”

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

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

“[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.”

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