George Sand Quotes

George Sand was a French Romantic novelist. One of her claims to fame was her relationship with Frederic Chopin. She used the pseudonym George Sand, but she was born Aurore Dupin. Here are a few quotes from George Sand.

• "Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it."
  - 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
  
  
• "Every historian discloses a new horizon."
  - 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
  
  
• "Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness."
  - 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
  
  
• "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."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "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."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "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."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "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."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "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?"
  - George Sand
  
  
• "One approaches the journey's end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "One changes from day to day, and... after a few years have passed one has completely altered."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "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."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart."
  - 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 capacity for passion is both cruel and divine."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "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, and one's inner happiness."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure."
  - George Sand
  
  
• "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."
  - George Sand