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
Oblivion is the flower that grows best on graves.
—George Sand
Vanity is the quicksand of reason.
—George Sand
Topics: One liners, Vanity
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
Where love is absent, there can be no woman.
—George Sand
Topics: Women
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
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
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
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
There is only one happiness in life—to love and be loved.
—George Sand
Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
—George Sand
Topics: Artists, Arts, Art
The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.
—George Sand
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.
—George Sand
Topics: Revolution, Revolutions, Revolutionaries
There are no greater prudes than those women who have some secret to hide.
—George Sand
Topics: Guilt
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
Life is a long ache which rarely sleeps and can never be cured.
—George Sand
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?
—George Sand
Topics: Disappointment, Remorse, Regret, Religion
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: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
The prayers of a lover are more imperious than the menaces of the whole world
—George Sand
Topics: Prayer
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
The whole secret of the study of nature lies in learning how to use one’s eyes.
—George Sand
Topics: Nature
No religion can be built on force.
—George Sand
Topics: Religion
The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning.
—George Sand
Topics: Change
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
It is high time that we had lights
that are not incendiary torches.
—George Sand
Topics: Wisdom
Love is the virtue of women.
—George Sand
Topics: Love
Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.
—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
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
Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.
—George Sand
Topics: Simplicity
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