Top 178 Quotes & Sayings by George Sand - Page 3

The smoke of glory is not worth the smoke of a pipe.

Fame and admiration weigh not a feather in the scale against friendship and love, for the heart languishes all the same.

To eat together is one of the greatest promoters of intimacy. It is the satisfaction in common of a material necessity of existence, and if you seek a loftier meaning in it, it is a communion.

Be prudent, and if you hear, * * * some insult or some threat, * * * have the appearance of not hearing it.

The mind has no sex.

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

God abandons only those who abandon themselves, and whoever has the courage to shut up his sorrow within his own heart is stronger to fight against it than he who complains.

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

Gossiping is the plague of little towns.

Weakness is oftentimes so palpable as to be equivalent to wickedness.

A cigar numbs sorrow and fills the solitary hours with a million gracious images.

Our work can never be better than we are ourselves.

Where love is absent there can be no woman.

The marriage vow is an absurdity imposed by society.

I saw in 'the wandering Jew' the personification of the Jewish people, exiled in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, they are once again extremely rich, owing to their unfailing rude greediness and their indefatigable activity. With their hard-heartedness that they extend toward people of other faiths and races they are at the point of making themselves kings of the world. This people can thank its obstinacy that France will be Judized within fifty years. Already some wise Jews prophesy this frankly.

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

... when we are misunderstood it is always our own fault. What the reader wants most of all is to be able to grasp what we think; but you loftily refuse to comply.

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.

Writing a journal means that facing your ocean you are afraid to swim across it, so you attempt to drink it drop by drop.

Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Wikis give us a place where anyone who is kind, thoughtful and intelligent can come and join us in building a better and more rational world. Jimmy Wales Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.

Celebrate within yourself that wonderful treasure . . . true kindness.

To be made evident, truth must be sought for; for of itself it is slow to appear, and between ourselves and God the obstacles are so many!

Art belongs to all times and to all countries; its special benefit is precisely to be still living when everything else seems dying; that is why Providence shields it from too personal or too general passions, and grants it a patient and persevering organization, durable sensibility, and the contemplative sense in which lies invincible faith.

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.

I know that I have found fulfillment. I have an object in life, a task ... a passion.

You, stupid one, who believe in laws which punish murder by murder...

... what is there over which the incomparable beauty of childhood would not triumph?

You see what stupid folk my publishers are; but they are all alike.

It is quite wrong to think of old age as a downward slope. On the contrary, one climbs higher and higher with the ad-vancing years, and that, too with sur-prising strides. Brain-work comes as easily to the old as physical exertion to the child. One is moving, it is true, towards the end of life, but that end is now a goal, and not a reef in which the vessel may be dashed.

O heart! love is thy bane and thy antidote.

Ever since time began the world has seemed stupid to those who aren't stupid themselves. It was to avoid that annoyance that I became stupid myself, as fast as ever I could. Sheer egoism, no doubt.

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.

Time is always wanting to me, and I cannot meet with a single day when I am nut hurried along, driven to by wits'-end by urgent work, business to attent do or some service to render.

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

We do not precisely enjoy liberty at the Figaro. M. de Latouche, our worthy director (ah! you should know the fellow), is always hanging over us, cutting, pruning, right or wrong, imposing upon us his whims, his aberrations, his fancies, and we have to write as he bids.

Humanity is outraged in me and with me.

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.

... the progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it.

Simplicity, a delicate silence about oneself, increases their worth and makes one love those whom one admires.

No religion can be built on force.

The more you lose the right to be jealous, the more so you become!

There is but on virtue--the eternal sacrifice of self.

...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.)

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.

Art speaks only to the mind, whereas nature speaks to all the faculties.

a woman, when she is heroic, is not heroic by halves.

The cigar is the perfect complement to an elegant lifestyle.

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

[Failure is hard initially because] One knows what one has lost, but not what one may find [and learn from that failure]!

It seems to me that the earth belongs to God who made it and entrusted it to men as a perpetual home. But it cannot have been part of His plan that some men should be ill with overfeeding and that others should die of starvation. No matter what anyone can say they cannot prevent me from feeling sad and angry when I see a beggar crying at a rich man's door.

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.

No one makes a revolution by himself.

Unrequited love is as different from the mutual love as the error from the truth.

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.

almost all novels are love stories.

I loved [fairy stories] so, and my mother weighed down by grief had given up telling me them. At Nohant I found Mmes. d'Ardony's and Perrault's tales in old editions which became my chief joy for five or six years ... I've never read them since, but I could tell each tale straight through, and I don't think anything in all one's intellecutal life can be compared to these delights of imagination.

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.