Skip to content

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

— George Sand

L'art n'est pas une étude de la réalité positive; c'est une recherche de la vérité idéale.

Original text (French)

Another quote →

Notes from Wikiquote

La Mare au Diable, ch. 1 (1851); Frank Hunter Potter (trans.) The Haunted Pool (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1895) p. 15

Topics

Art

More quotes by George Sand

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

The Haunted Pool (1890)

He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power.

The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.

Art is a demonstration of which nature is the proof.

He would spend six weeks on one page, only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring.

All George Sand quotes →

You may also like

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: George Sand (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.