George Sand

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

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?

I regard as a mortal sin not only the lying of the senses in matters of love, but also the illusion which the senses seek to create where love is only partial. I say, I believe, that one must love with all of one's being, or else live, come what may, a life of complete chastity.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

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

If they are ignorant, they are despised, if learned, mocked. In love they are reduced to the status of courtesans. As wives they are treated more as servants than as companions. Men do not love them: they make use of them, they exploit them, and expect, in that way, to make them subject to the law of fidelity.

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.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

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.

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