George Sand
honesty dies in selling itself.Collection: Honesty
The capacity for passion is both cruel and divine.Collection: Passion
When they are among us cats are angelsCollection: Cat
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.Collection: Believe
Believe in no other God than the one who insists on justice and equality among men.Collection: Believe
Not to love is to cease to live.Collection: Love Is
We must have a passion in life.Collection: Passion
... when we are misunderstood it is always our own fault. What the reader wants most of all is to be able to grasp what we think; but you loftily refuse to comply.Collection: Thinking
To eat together is one of the greatest promoters of intimacy. It is the satisfaction in common of a material necessity of existence, and if you seek a loftier meaning in it, it is a communion.Collection: Together
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.Collection: Doe
Travelling is like a novel: it's what happens that counts.Collection: Novel
I needn't tell you that success and failure prove nothing - the whole thing is a lottery. It's pleasant to succeed; but for a philosophic mind it oughtn't to be very upsetting to fail.Collection: Upset
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.Collection: Believe
It is extraordinary how music sends one back into memories of the past.Collection: Memories
... love is too delicate a flower to rise again when one has trampled it under foot.Collection: Flower
No human being can control love, and no one is to blame either for feeling it or for losing it. What alone degrades a woman is falsehood.Collection: Feelings
Happiness lies in the consciousness we have of it.Collection: Happiness
The brain is a tool that gets rusty without constant, albeit moderate, exercise.Collection: Exercise
The life of great geniuses is nothing but a sublime storm.Collection: Sublime
Immodest creature, you do not want a woman who will accept your faults, you want the one who pretends you are faultless - one who will caress the hand that strikes her and kiss the lips that lie to her.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Helping Others
I'm not full of virtues and noble qualities. I love, but I love strongly, exclusive, stedfasty.Collection: Quality
I would rather believe that God did not exist than believe that he was indifferent.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Country
Genius, whether locked up in a cell or roaming at large, is always solitary.Collection: Cells
Discouragement seizes us only when we can no longer count on chance.Collection: Chance
Age continually alters the faces of those who think or study, and so their portraits differ from one another and don't even resemble them for very long. I dream so much and live so little that I'm sometimes only three years old. But the next day I'm three hundred, if the dream has been sombre.Collection: Dream
Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and writeCollection: Queens
... everyone's free to embark on either a great clipper or a little fishing boat. An artist is an explorer who oughtn't to shrink from anything: it doesn't matter whether he goes to the left or the right -- his goal sanctifies all.Collection: Artist
The marriage vow is an absurdity imposed by society.Collection: Vow
Unrequited love is as different from the mutual love as the error from the truth.Collection: Unrequited Love
Art belongs to all times and to all countries; its special benefit is precisely to be still living when everything else seems dying; that is why Providence shields it from too personal or too general passions, and grants it a patient and persevering organization, durable sensibility, and the contemplative sense in which lies invincible faith.Collection: Country
God abandons only those who abandon themselves, and whoever has the courage to shut up his sorrow within his own heart is stronger to fight against it than he who complains.Collection: Heart
One never knows how much a family may grow; and when a hive is too full, and it is necessary to form a new swarm, each one thinks of carrying away his own honey.Collection: Thinking
Our work can never be better than we are ourselves.Collection: Work
Weeds are omnipresent; errors are to be found in the heart of the most lovable.Collection: Weed
Fame and admiration weigh not a feather in the scale against friendship and love, for the heart languishes all the same.Collection: Heart
The whole secret of the study of nature lies in learning how to use one's eyes.Collection: Nature
It is quite wrong to think of old age as a downward slope. On the contrary, one climbs higher and higher with the ad-vancing years, and that, too with sur-prising strides. Brain-work comes as easily to the old as physical exertion to the child. One is moving, it is true, towards the end of life, but that end is now a goal, and not a reef in which the vessel may be dashed.Collection: Children
A cigar numbs sorrow and fills the solitary hours with a million gracious images.Collection: Sorrow
There are no more thorough prudes than those who have some little secret to hide.Collection: Secret
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Wikis give us a place where anyone who is kind, thoughtful and intelligent can come and join us in building a better and more rational world. Jimmy Wales Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.Collection: Kindness
To be made evident, truth must be sought for; for of itself it is slow to appear, and between ourselves and God the obstacles are so many!Collection: Obstacles
My strength has not equaled my mad ambition. I have remained obscure; I have done worse -- I have touched success, and allowed it to escape me.Collection: Ambition
Celebrate within yourself that wonderful treasure . . . true kindness.Collection: Inspirational Love
I know that I have found fulfillment. I have an object in life, a task ... a passion.Collection: Work
The mind has no sex.Collection: Sex
Life is a slate where all our sins are written; from time to time we rub the sponge of repentance over it so we can begin sinning again.Collection: Life Is
Where love is absent there can be no woman.Collection: Love