Georges Bernanos Quotations

It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.

Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.

No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

Hope is a risk that must be run.

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.

What does the truth matter? Haven't we mothers all given our sons a taste for lies, lies which from the cradle upwards lull them, reassure them, send them to sleep: lies as soft and warm as a breast!

Faith is not a thing which one loses, we merely cease to shape our lives by it.

A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all.

It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man.

The wish to pray is a prayer in itself. God can ask no more than that of us.

A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.

Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it.

Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it.

The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.

Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.

Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterward.

Faith is not a thing which one ''loses',' we merely cease to shape our lives by it.

The worst, the most corrupting of lies, are problems poorly stated,

To you a pious young girl who goes to mass and communion, seems pretty silly and childish; you take us for innocents... Well, let me tell you, sometimes we know more about evil than people who have only learned to offend God.

I have just discovered something I have always known: we can no more escape from one another than we can escape from God.

Like all truly pure souls she [Chantal] quickly resigned herself to past faults, thought only of how to repair whatever harm they had done. "Of all my daughters, you are certainly the least bothered by scruples of conscience," Abbé Chevance used to say.... Even sin, once the will is detached and no longer nourishes it, withers and dies sterile. It is in the secret of intentions, like in a decomposing humus, in the dark forest of future sins, unpardoned sins, half dead, half living, that new poisons are distilled.

Sadness came into the world with Satan that world our Saviour never prayed for, the world you say I do not know. Oh, it is not so difficult to recognize: it is the world that prefers cold to warmth! What can God find to say to those who, of their own free will, of their own weight incline towards sadness and turn instinctively towards the night?

If hell has no answer for the questioning dead, it is not because it refuses to answer (for rigorous, alas, in observance, is the imperishable fire), but it is because hell has nothing to say, will say nothing eternally.

God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best.

[T]here is nothing that God hates so much as a liar.

[P]ride has no intrinsic substance, being no more than the name given to the soul devouring itself. When that loathsome perversion of love has borne its fruit, it has another, more meaningful and weightier name. We call it hatred.

More often than not, nothingness is reluctantly and despairingly taken to be the only hypothesis possible when all the others have failed, since by definition it cannot be disproven and is beyond the scope of reason.

The contradictions in Renan , his feminine sensibility, coquetry, unavowed egotism, and sudden emotional outbursts, all indicate a soul deliberately using distraction as a means of evasion. The perpetual equivocation bears witness to God in the same way as the twisting and turning of a hunted animal indicates the presence of an unseen hunter.

Le de s ir de la prie' re est de j a' une prie' re. The wish for prayer is already a prayer.

I don't think we can ever learn much from ultra-sensitive, shifty faces, skilled in disguise, that hide themselves in lust, as beasts hide to die.

Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.

Only the present counts.

[A]ll her life she [Chantal] had been carefully, heroically watching over mediocre beings who were hardly real, over things of no value.

...the most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre.

Hell is not to love anymore.

I have done no passably decent job in this world which did not at first seem to me useless - absurdly useless, useless to the point of nausea. My secret demon is called:;: What's the use?

[F]irst of all, be what you are.

Appearances are nothing.... And first of all they should not be feared, they are only dangerous to the weak.

What does it matter, all is grace.

But I shall give less thought to the future, I shall work in the present. I feel such work is within my power. For I only succeed in small things, and when I am tried by anxiety, I am bound to say it is the small joys that release me.

Hell, madame, is to love no longer.

God ordains that beggars should beg for greatness, as for all else, when greatness shines out of them, and they don't know it.

God! how is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?

To be able to share in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness.

And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning - enemies of society, as you call them. You're kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of God's justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient it's easy enough for you to put it on one side. Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more!

I know the compassion of others is a relief at first. I don't despise it. But it can't quench pain, it slips through your soul as through a sieve. And when our suffering has been dragged from one pity to another, as from one mouth to another, we can no longer respect or love it.

When you think of the huge uninterrupted success of a book like Don Quixote, you're bound to realize that if humankind have not yet finished being revenged, by sheer laughter, for being let down in their greatest hope, it is because that hope was cherished so long and lay so deep!

Have you never been moved by poor men's fidelity, the image of you they form in their simple minds? Why should you always talk of their envy, without understanding that what they ask of you is not so much your worldly goods, as something very hard to define, which they themselves can put no name to; yet at times it consoles their loneliness; a dream of splendor, of magnificence, a tawdry dream, a poor man's dream -and yet God blesses it!

Fear, true fear, is a savage frenzy. Of all the insanities of which we are capable, it is surely the cruelest. There is naught to equal its drive, and naught can survive its thrust.

A man given to vice is always an idealist.

A large number of suspects, both men and women, escaped martial law for lack of any shred of evidence against them on which a court-martial could convict. So they began setting them free in groups, according to their birth-place. But half-way, the car-load would be emptied into a ditch.

Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless.

Optimism has always seemed to me the cunning alibi of egoists, anxious to cover up their state of chronic self-satisfaction. They are optimists in order to avoid pitying other men and their misfortune. ~~ Yet pity is a vexed question.

Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.

I can now see to the bottom of my own depths, there is nothing stopping my gaze, no obstacle is in the way. And there is nothing there.

The most dangerous of our calculations are those we call illusions.

Optimism approves of everything, submits to everything, believes everything; it is the virtue above all of the taxpayer.

When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears?

[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.

Truth is meant to save you first. The comfort comes afterward.

The devil, you see, is that friend who never stays with us to the end.

Fact is Our Lord knew all about the power of money: He gave capitalism a tiny niche in His scheme of things, He gave it a chance, He even provided a first installment of funds. Can you beat that? It's so magnificent. God despises nothing. After all, if the deal had come off, Judas would probably have endowed sanatoriums, hospitals, public libraries or laboratories.

Suicide only really frightens those who are never tempted by it and never will be, for its darkness only welcomes those who are predestined to it.

What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on their first flight are hardly so hovered around.

The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.

You owe it to everyone you love to find pockets of tranquility in your busy world.

[A] good Christian does not care for miracles very much, because a miracle is God looking after His own affairs, and we prefer looking after them for Him.

Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather, at the very source of its life! To confound this lust in man with that desire which unites the sexes is like confusing a tumor with the very organ which it devours, a tumor whose very deformity horribly reproduces the shape.

Chantal's only ruse ... was her shattering simplicity. While a weak man or an imposter is always more complicated than the problem he is trying to solve, and thinking to encompass his adversary, merely keeps prowling interminably around himself, the heroic nature will throw itself into the heart of the danger to turn it to its own use, just as captured artillery is turned about and aimed at the backs of the fleeing enemy.

The world is eaten up by boredom. You can't see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is sifted so fine, it doesn't even grit on your teeth. But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands.

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humilation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for-the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.