Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin (1804–76,) known by her nom de plume George Sand, was a French novelist. She was the most successful woman writer of her century. Her novels present large portraiture of the romantic sentiment and 19th-century life, particularly its more pastoral aspects.
Born in Paris, Sand became infamous for her unconventional lifestyle, which included a penchant for wearing men’s clothing, the use of her selected pseudonym, and open liaisons with such prominent figures as the Polish composer Frédéric Chopin and the French dramatist Alfred de Musset. Her Elle et Lui (1859; She and He) is a fictionalized account of her affair with Musset, and Un Hiver à Majorque (1841; A Winter in Majorca) with Chopin.
Sand’s earlier Romantic novels such as Lélia (1833) and Mauprat (1837) represent women’s struggles against conservative morals. Her later novels include the popular La Mare au Diable (1846; The Devil’s Pool,) Les Maîtres Sonneurs (1853; The Bagpipers,) and Indiana (1853.)
Sand also wrote a French adaption of Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1856.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by George Sand
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.
—George Sand
Topics: Farming
One is happy as a result of one’s own efforts—once one knows 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.
—George Sand
Topics: Happiness
Vanity is the quicksand of reason.
—George Sand
Topics: One liners, Vanity
The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.
—George Sand
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves.
—George Sand
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.
—George Sand
Topics: Love
Vanity is the quicksand of reason.
—George Sand
Topics: Vanity, One liners
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.
—George Sand
Topics: Excitement, Faith
Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.
—George Sand
Topics: Kindness, Disappointment, Regret, Remorse
Love is the virtue of women.
—George Sand
Topics: Love
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.
—George Sand
Topics: Women
Work is not man’s punishment! It is his reward and his strength, his glory and his pleasure.
—George Sand
Topics: Work
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.
—George Sand
Topics: Soul
It is sad, no doubt, to exhaust one’s strength and one’s days in cleaving the bosom of this jealous earth, which compels us to wring from it the treasures of its fertility, when a bit of the blackest and coarsest bread is, at the end of the day’s work, the sole recompense and the sole profit attaching to so arduous a toil.
—George Sand
Topics: Farming
Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.
—George Sand
Topics: Charity
We must love stupid people better than ourselves; are they not the really unfortunate ones of this world? Do not people without taste and without ideal grow constantly weary, rejoicing in nothing, and being quite useless here below?
—George Sand
Topics: Ambition
Life is a long ache which rarely sleeps and can never be cured.
—George Sand
A man loved by a beautiful and virtuous woman, carries with him a talisman that renders him invulnerable; every one feels that such a one’s life has a higher value than that of others.
—George Sand
Topics: Love
No religion can be built on force.
—George Sand
Topics: Religion
The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.
—George Sand
A woman cannot love a man she feels to be her inferior; love without veneration and enthusiasm is only friendship.
—George Sand
Topics: Love
Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
—George Sand
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts
Where love is absent, there can be no woman.
—George Sand
Topics: Women
It is high time that we had lights
that are not incendiary torches.
—George Sand
Topics: Wisdom
He who finds elevated and lofty pleasure in the feeling of poetry is a true poet, though he never composed a line of verse in his entire lifetime.
—George Sand
Topics: Poetry
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
—George Sand
The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning.
—George Sand
Topics: Change
There is but one virtue—the eternal sacrifice of self.
—George Sand
Topics: Self-Discovery
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.
—George Sand
Topics: Perception, Beauty
There is only one happiness in life—to love and be loved.
—George Sand
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