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Georges Bernanos Quotes
1888–1948 France
Georges Bernanos (20 February 1888 – 5 July 1948) was a French writer. A Roman Catholic and royalist, his novel The Diary of a Country Priest was filmed by Robert Bresson.
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God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best.
The sin against hope: the most deadly of all, and perhaps the most accepted, the most cherished.
I have just discovered something I have always known: we can no more escape from one another than we can escape from God.
There's no hatred that can ever be satisfied either in this world or the next, and the hatred that one has for oneself is probably the one for which there is no forgiveness.
A man given to vice is always an idealist.
Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless.
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 first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
There's no hatred that can be satisfied either in this world or the next, and the hatred that one has for oneself is probably the one for which there is no forgiveness.
Monsieur Ouine (1943)
[T]here is nothing that God hates so much as a liar.
She isn't very clever or very devout,... and she certainly empties the whole salt cellar into the stories she tells me. But I love her because she never lies.
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?
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.
[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.
Appearances are nothing.... And first of all they should not be feared, they are only dangerous to the weak.
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.
Priests moreover are all the more singular and unclassifiable in that they do not recognize themselves as such and are nearly always dupes of the most gross outward appearances — whether of the irony of some or the servile deference of others.
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.
For temptation is like the birth of another man inside a man, a horrible extension of himself. He drags this weight in his heart, not daring to cast it from him. For where could he cast it? Into another heart? The saint is always alone, at the foot of the cross. No other friend.
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