Georges Bernanos Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georges Bernanos
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!

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

Georges Bernanos
No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

Georges Bernanos
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.

Georges Bernanos
You don't wage civil war in kid gloves. The Spanish bishops know it so well that they have been obliged to refer to 'regrettable excesses' and 'inevitable abuses'. They seem to think that war is like Shrove Tuesday, that it's a jolly respite, as it were, from social morality, and that men can give themselves up to being cruel just as gay sparks at carnival-time indulge in bottom-pinching! Once the illuminations go out, we must welcome the dear lad home with a smile that's both knowing and fatherly. 'Don't worry, my dear boy. We can none of us resist a little fun sometimes. Think no more about it.' But, Your Excellencies, this is something more than a little fun!

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

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

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

Georges Bernanos
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.

Georges Bernanos
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.

Georges Bernanos
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?

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

Georges Bernanos
I shouldn't dream of wasting my time by picking holes in the attitude of the Italian prelates throughout the war for Ethiopia. Thanks to the mustard-gas sprinklers that are used in Australia for destroying rodents, Fascist aviation has been enabled to strip whole populations of hapless negroes of their skin, so that they lay rotting in heaps in front of their huts. It makes no difference to me if the Italian prelates affirm that a war like this seems chivalrous to them. I believe that I know what is chivalrous and what is not...

Georges Bernanos
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.

Georges Bernanos
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.

Georges Bernanos
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.

Georges Bernanos
Once or twice, when she [Chantal] had adroitly avoided an opportunity of pleasing or winning admiration (for her shrewd wit and vivacity made her popular), she was astonished at his [Abbé Chevance's] disapproval. [She asked him why.] Blushing he had replied, "I will tell you, my daughter. I used to try very hard to be admired, to be liked. That is the world!" Then, with that profound finesse which no one had ever had the wit to recognize in the former priest of Costerel-sur-Meuse, he at once added, "I had more to fear from the world than you have."

Georges Bernanos
Democracies cannot dispense with hypocrisy any more than dictatorships can with cynicism.

Georges Bernanos
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?

Georges Bernanos
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!

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

Georges Bernanos
There is nothing that God hates so much as a liar.

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

Georges Bernanos
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.

Georges Bernanos