George Sand Quotes

La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n’est que le prestige d’un moment; l’œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme.

"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."

Le fossoyeur fit la cuisine et la fit fort bien.

Admiration and familiarity are strangers.

I was born to love - but none of you wanted to believe it, and that misunderstanding was crucial in forming my character. It's true that nature was strangely inconsistent in giving me a warm heart, but also a face that was like a stone mask and a tongue that was heavy and slow. She refused me what she bestowed freely on even the most loutish of my fellow men. . . . People judged my inner character by my outer covering, and like a sterile fruit, I withered under the rough husk I couldn't slough off.

By prayer I do not mean a chosen arrangement of words cast toward heaven, but a silent conversation with an ideal of luminous perfection."

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

MEPHISTOPHELES: What dreary, stale employment to keep watch on a philosopher! [...] These logicians are distrustful souls. One works like a spider around their cold brains to catch them in the web of dialectic, but the result is that they kick and catch the devil in threads of their own making. They use chicanery to resist the master who taught it to them! This one uses demonstrative reason to arrive at faith, and what ruins others saves him from my claws. You are a mystical pedant who gives me more pain than did your ancestor, Faust. [...] Behold, philosophers who want at one and the same time to understand and to feel. If we let them get away with it, man will slip between our fingers quickly enough. Hola, my masters! Believe and be absurd, we agree to that; but don’t complicate it by trying both to believe and to be wise.

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.

Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué.

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

(Il n'y a qu'un bonheur dans la vie, c'est d'aimer et d'être aimé.)

Les sujets m'obsèdent. Quand je ferme les yeux, je vois une armée, un monde de création se peindre et s'agiter dans mon cerveau. Quand je rouvre les yeux, tout cela disparaît. [...] Et quand je m'approche de cette table maudite, la lave se fige et l'inspiration se refroidit. Pendant le temps d'apprêter une feuille de papier et de tailler ma plume, l'ennui me gagne ; l'odeur de l'encre me donne des nausées. Et puis cette horrible nécessité de traduire par des mots et d'aligner en pâtes de mouches des pensées ardentes, vives, mobiles comme les rayons du soleil teignant les nuages de l'air.

[I]t is that we are too apt to despise what appears to be neither good nor beautiful, and thus we lose what is helpful and salutary.

Corambé debía tener, por lo tanto, todos los atributos de la belleza física y moral: el don de la elocuencia, el encanto poderoso de las artes y, sobre todo, la magia de la improvisación musical.

His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, indecision, and impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he had heard: what had come to him all of a piece, he now over-analyzed in his desire to write it down, and his regret at not finding it again "neat," as he said, would throw him into a kind of despair. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating and changing a single measure a hundred times, writing it and effacing it with equal frequency, and beginning again the next day with a meticulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page, only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring.