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.

Humanity is outraged in me and with me. We must not dissimulate nor try to forget this indignation, which is one of the most passionate forms of love.

Young love needs dangers and barriers to nourish it.

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?

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

One is happy as a result of one's own efforts, once one knows of 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. Happiness is no vague dream, of that I now feel certain.

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.

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.

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

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.

One approaches the journey's end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe.

Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.

When I tried to draw near, you dissolved into air before my lips could touch you...

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

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.

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

The prayers of a lover are more imperious than the menaces of the whole world

Women love always: when earth slips from them, they take refuge in heaven.

Talent, will and genius are natural phenomena like the lake, the volcano, the mountain, the wind, the star, the cloud.

Let us accept truth, even when it surprises us and alters our views.

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