Quotes from 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.

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

As far as I am concerned I would rather spend the rest of my life in prison than marry again.

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

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

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

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.

My strength has not equaled my mad ambition. I have remained obscure; I have done worse -- I have touched success, and allowed it to escape me.

Whoever has loved once, knows all that life contains of sorrow and of joy.

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.

The life of great geniuses is nothing but a sublime storm.

Life is a succession of afflictions for the heart.

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.

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.

Death must no longer be either the penalty for prosperity or the consolation of misery. God did not destine it to be either the punishment or the compensation for life.

Je n'ai pas cessé de l'être si c'est d'être jeune que d'aimer toujours !... L'humanité n'est pas un vain mot. Notre vie est faite d'amour, et ne plus aimer c'est ne plus vivre. (I have never ceased to be young, if being young is always loving... Humanity is not a vain word. Our life is made of love, and to love no longer is to live no longer.)

Admiration and familiarity are strangers.

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

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

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.

When they are among us cats are angels

La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n'est que le prestige d'un moment; l'œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme. (The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes, she continued, is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.) [Le beau Laurence]

In times when evil comes because men misunderstand and hate one another, it is the mission of the artist to praise sweetness, confidence, and friendship, and so to remind men, hardened or discouraged, that pure morals, tender sentiments, and primitive justice still exist, or at least can exist, in this world.

Ce n'est pas la première fois que je remarque combien, en France particulièrement, les mots ont plus d'empire que les idées. (It's not the first time I've noticed how much more power words have than ideas, particularly in France.)