Quotes from George Sand

No human creature can give orders to love.

The whole secret of the study of nature lies in learning how to use one's eyes.

Deliberately, women are given a deplorable education…. While man frees himself from constraining civil and religious bonds, he is only too glad to have woman hold tightly to the Christian principle of suffering and keeping her silence.

In our wholly factitious society, to have no cash at all means frightful want or absolute powerlessness.

No one makes a revolution by himself; and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand.

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.

The capacity for passion is both cruel and divine.

Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one's talent, to one's affections, and one's inner happiness.

One is happy 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.

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

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

There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved. (Il n'y a qu'un bonheur dans la vie, c'est d'aimer et d'être aimé.)

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.

Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect

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." (Letter, 17 June 1837)

You can bind my body, tie my hands, govern my actions: you are the strongest, and society adds to your power; but with my will, sir, you can do nothing.

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

The capacity of passion is both cruel and divine

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

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.

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.

Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life. (La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie.)

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

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.