George Sand Quotes

"[On Chopin's Preludes:]

"His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky. ... The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power.

"La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie."

("Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.")

All our days are the same; they are all calm and beautiful; they pass swiftly and purely like those of our childhood.

Beau chou, disent-ils, vis et fleuris, afin que notre jeune mariée ait un beau petit enfant avant la fin de l'année; car si tu mourais trop vite ce serait signe de stérilité, et tu serais là-haut sur sa maison comme un mauvais présage.

arrachons, s'il se peut, au néant de l'oubli, le sillon de Germain, le fin laboureur

That women differ from men, that heart and intellect are subject to the laws of sex, I do not doubt. But ought this difference, so essential to the general harmony of life, to constitute a moral inferiority? And does it
necessarily follow that the souls and minds of women are inferior to those of men, whose vanity permits them to tolerate no other natural order?

Chacun pourrait intéresser au roman de sa propre vie, s'il l'avait compris...

bon Dieu ne fait personne sans lui réserver son bonheur dans une autre personne.

Autumn is a melancholy and graceful andante, that prepares beautifully solemn adagio of winter

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.

I'm not full of virtues and noble qualities. I love, but I love strongly, exclusive, stedfasty.

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

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.

Masterpieces are only lucky attempts.

Taisez-vous, sotte et impertinente créature ; vos phrases de roman nous ennuient.