Sand on Charity and Faith

Today is the birthday of George Sand (1804-1876), the French writer whose thoughts on charity ought perhaps be meditated upon by the adherents of today's nanny state.

Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.

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.

Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

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.

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.

Life in common among people who love each other is the ideal of happiness.

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.