George Sand
Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength and his pleasure.Collection: Work
Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age.Collection: Age
Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.Collection: Experience
There is only one happiness in this life, to love and be loved.Collection: Happiness
Women love always: when earth slips from them, they take refuge in heaven.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Faith
The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.Collection: Art
He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.Collection: Poetry
Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness.Collection: Happiness
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.Collection: Happiness
Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.
We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.
Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.
Vanity is the quicksand of reason.
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
Every historian discloses a new horizon.
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?
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.
No human creature can give orders to love.
The prayers of a lover are more imperious than the menaces of the whole world.
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.
Admiration and familiarity are strangers.
One changes from day to day, and... after a few years have passed one has completely altered.
One approaches the journey's end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe.
I see upon their noble brows the seal of the Lord, for they were born kings of the earth far more truly than those who possess it only from having bought it.
The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.
I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.
Let us accept truth, even when it surprises us and alters our views.Collection: Angel
a woman's heart has no wrinkles.Collection: Heart
The intellect seeks, the heart finds.Collection: Heart
If people were not wicked I should not mind their being stupid; but, to our misfortune, they are both.Collection: Stupid
You may impose silence upon me, but you can not prevent me from thinking.Collection: Freedom
Learned women are ridiculed because they put to shame unlearned men.Collection: Education
Experience is always a trustworthy guide; it may not tell you everything, but it never lies.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Thinking
Love without reverence and enthusiasm is only friendship.Collection: Love
These tears do me good, they have watered the parched place; perhaps my heart will grow again there!Collection: Heart
A child motivated by competitive ideals will grow into a man without conscience, shame, or true dignity.Collection: Children
It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides.Collection: Funny
There is only one sex. A man and a woman are so entirely the same thing that one can scarcely understand the subtle reasons for sex distinctions with which our minds are filled.Collection: Sex
To forgive a fault in another is more sublime than to be faultless one's self.Collection: Forgiveness
Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.Collection: Flower
Simplicity is the essence of the great, the true, the beautiful in art.Collection: Beautiful
All your trouble comes from lack of exercise. A man of your strength and constitution ought always to have kept physically active. So don't jibe at the very wise advice that sentences you to one hour's walk a day. You imagine the work of the mind takes place only in the brain; but you're much mistaken. It takes place in the legs as well.Collection: Wise
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.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Hands
Young love needs dangers and barriers to nourish it.Collection: Young Love
The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning.Collection: Different
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.Collection: Wise
Ah! that Senate is a world of ice and darkness! It votes the destruction of peoples as the simplest and wisest thing; for its members themselves are moribund.Collection: Ice