Top 150 George Sand Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “If people were not wicked I should not mind their being stupid; but, to our misfortune, they are both.”

— George Sand

103. “Vanity is the most despotic and iniquitous of masters, and I can never be the slave of my own vices.”

— George Sand

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

— George Sand

105. “There is but on virtue – the eternal sacrifice of self.”

— George Sand

106. “No human being can control love, and no one is to blame either for feeling it or for losing it. What alone degrades a woman is falsehood.”

— George Sand

107. “Some say that cats are devils, but they behave badly only when they are alone. When they are among us cats are angels.”

— George Sand

108. “The smoke of glory is not worth the smoke of a pipe.”

— George Sand

109. “You don’t have to write to me if you don’t feel like it. There’s no real friendship without absolute freedom.”

— George Sand

110. “When they are among us cats are angels.”

— George Sand

111. “The capacity of passion is both cruel and divine.”

— George Sand

112. “When a marriage for love is on the carpet; you must expect to waste time. But when it’s a marriage of convenience between two people who have no whims and who know what they want; it’s soon arranged.”

— George Sand

113. “There are no more thorough prudes than those who have some little secret to hide.”

— George Sand

114. “It is extraordinary how music sends one back into memories of the past...”

— George Sand

115. “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

116. “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.”

— George Sand

117. “A man is not a wall, whose stones are crushed upon the road; or a pipe, whose fragments are thrown away at a street corner. The fragments of an intellect are always good.”

— George Sand

118. “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.”

— George Sand

119. “Every historian discloses a new horizon.”

— George Sand

120. “The marriage vow is an absurdity imposed by society.”

— George Sand

121. “Where love is absent there can be no woman.”

— George Sand

122. “Gossiping is the plague of little towns.”

— George Sand

123. “Travelling is like a novel: it’s what happens that counts.”

— George Sand

124. “At the very time I should speak out I feel more than ever the impossibility of doing so.”

— George Sand

125. “The masses are still ungrateful or ignorant. They prefer murder, poisonings, and crimes generally to a literature possessed of style and feeling.”

— George Sand

126. “There are moments of exaltation and ecstasy when our thoughts become, in a way, more pure, more subtle, more ethereal. These rare moments raise us up so high, carry us so far out of ourselves, that when we fall back to earth we lose the consciousness and the memory of that intellectual intoxication. Who can understand the anchorite’s mysterious visions? Who can relate the dreams of the poet before his emotion has cooled so that he can write them down for us?”

— George Sand

127. “The constant winds of petty appetite dissipate the power of response.”

— George Sand

128. “Love without reverence and enthusiasm is only friendship.”

— George Sand

129. “The more you lose the right to be jealous, the more so you become!”

— George Sand

130. “Honestly, I do not believe in a drunk Byron writing beautiful verses. Inspiration can pass through the soul just as easily in the midst of an orgy as in the silence of the woods, but when it is a question of giving form to your thoughts, whether you are secluded in your study or performing on the planks of a stage, you must be in total possession of yourself.”

— George Sand

131. “I’m not sure that there’s anything more horrible than staying in a furnished room in Paris, especially.”

— George Sand

132. “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

133. “Discouragement seizes us only when we can no longer count on chance.”

— George Sand

134. “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

135. “Life is a succession of afflictions for the heart.”

— George Sand

136. “I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one’s being...”

— George Sand

137. “And I refused to make any sacrifices; for nothing on earth seemed more valuable than my peace of mind, my pleasure and my acclaim.”

— George Sand

138. “One never knows how much a family may grow; and when a hive is too full, and it is necessary to form a new swarm, each one thinks of carrying away his own honey.”

— George Sand

139. “Years do not always make age.”

— George Sand

140. “The publication of a book only brings very paltry results to its author.”

— George Sand

141. “Heavens! whatever possesses us, here below, that we mutually torment ourselves, sourly reproach our mutual faults, and mercilessly condemn all that is not cut according to our pattern?”

— George Sand

142. “Weeds are omnipresent; errors are to be found in the heart of the most lovable.”

— George Sand

143. “Weakness is oftentimes so palpable as to be equivalent to wickedness.”

— George Sand

144. “Between genius and madness there is often not the thickness of a hair.”

— George Sand

145. “No one makes a revolution by himself.”

— George Sand

146. “But it’s different with a woman. Her work in the house is to keep not to get.”

— George Sand

147. “For her, finally, the literary art is an instrument of social salvation – it is her means of touching the world with her ideals, her love, her aspiration; for him the literary art is the avenue of escape from the meaningless chaos of existence – it is his subtly critical condemnation of the world.”

— George Sand

148. “If you do not cease loving me, you will see me, you will feel me, you will hear me everywhere. My form will be before your eyes because it will remain engraved on your mind; my voice will echo in your ear because it will remain in your heart’s memory: my spirit will again reveal itself to your spirit because your soul understands me and knows me completely.”

— George Sand

149. “A hundred times in life,” she declares, “the good that one does seems to serve no immediate purpose; yet it maintains in one way and another the tradition of well wishing and well doing, without which all would perish.”

— George Sand

150. “The correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, if approached merely as a chapter in the biographies of these heroes of nineteenth century letters, is sufficiently rewarding.”

— George Sand