George Sand Quotes

Women love always: when earth slips from them, they take refuge in heaven. No religion can be built on force. We must love stupid people better than ourselves; are they not the really unfortunate ones of this world? Do not people without taste and without ideal grow constantly weary, rejoicing in nothing, and being quite useless here below? No one makes a revolution by himself. Where love is absent there can be no woman. O heart! love is thy bane and thy antidote. Humanity is outraged in me and with me. No place is ugly to those who understand the virtues and sweetness of everything that God has made. Unrequited love is as different from the mutual love as the error from the truth. It is love, not faith, that moves mountains. Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it. A day will come when everything in my life will be changed, when I shall do good to others, when some one will love me, when I shall give my whole heart to the man whi gives ne his; neanwhile, U will suffer in silence and keep my love as a reward for him who shall set me free. Talent, will and genius are natural phenomena like the lake, the volcano, the mountain, the wind, the star, the cloud. The most honest of men is the one who thinks and acts best, but the most powerful is the one who writes and speaks best. Masterpieces are only lucky attempts. 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. The intellect seeks, the heart finds. Years do not always make age. Nature distributes her favors unequally. 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. A cigar numbs sorrow and fills the solitary hours with a million gracious images. The cigar is the perfect complement to an elegant lifestyle. I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a thousand birds in the country, the movement of the ships on the waters. I love also absolute, profound silence, and, in short, I love everything that is around me, no matter where I am. Vanity is the quicksand of reason. 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. 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. 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. Know how to replace in your heart, by the happiness of those you love, the happiness that may be wanting to yourself When they are among us cats are angels 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.