(Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin)
Intriguing, inspiring, and subversive; France's most famous 19th C. woman writer; friend to Franz Liszt, Balzac, Henry James, Browning, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev; famous lover of composer Chopin, and famous actress Marie Dorval, George Sand was a cross-dressing, cigar and hookah smoking, rebellious and scandalous dramatist and campaigner for important political reforms. Not the most likely person for this list, her creative courage and compassionate kindness make it an easy choice. As she wrote, “Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.”
Gustave Flaubert letter
“Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.”
Chapters:
36. The Small, Dark Light
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“Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.”
Chapters:
63. Easy as Hard
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“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.”
Chapters:
81. Journey Without Goal
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“There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.”
Chapters:
69. No Enemy
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“We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.”
Chapters:
16. Returning to the Root, Meditation
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“The magnet embraces the iron, the animals come together by the difference of sex... Man alone speaks with distrust, irony, and shame of the miracle which takes place simultaneously in his soul and his body. This separation of the spirit from the flesh has necesssitated convents and brothels.”
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“Simplicity if the essence of the great, the true, and the beautiful”
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“The magnet embraces the iron, the animals come together by the difference of sex... Man alone speaks with distrust, irony, and shame of the miracle which takes place simultaneously in his soul and his body. This separation of the spirit from the flesh has necesssitated convents and brothels.”
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“There is only one sex. A man and a woman are so entirely the same thing, that one hardly understands the mass of distinctions and of subtle reasons with which society is nourished concerning this subject.”
from Gustave Flaubert letter
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“Nature is eternally young, beautiful and generous. It pours poetry and beauty into all beings and plants, which are allowed to develop as they wish. It has the secret of happiness, and no one has been able to take it away from it.”
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