George Sand

Who was George Sand?

Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, best known by her pseudonym George Sand, was a French novelist and memoirist. She is equally well-known for her much publicized romantic affairs with a number of celebrities including Frédéric Chopin and Alfred de Musset.

Famous Quotes:

• 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.
• There is only one happiness in life -- to love and to be loved.
• 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.
• Work is not man's punishment! It is his reward and his strength, his glory and his pleasure.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
• One approaches the journey's end. But the end is a goal, not a catastrophe.
• 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.