George Sand

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

— 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

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

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

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

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

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

There is only one happiness in life -- to love and to be loved.

— 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

If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity.

— George Sand

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

— George Sand

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

— George Sand

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.

— 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. God alone can restrain it and curb it. Seek then a law, a dungeon, an instrument of torture, by which you can hold it, it is as if you wished to grasp the air, and seize vacancy.

— George Sand

Where love is absent there can be no woman.

— George Sand

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