Georges Bernanos Short Quotes

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

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

Georges Bernanos
Hell is not to love any more, madame. Not to love any more!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georges Bernanos
Void fascinates those who daren't look into it. They throw themselves in, for fear of falling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georges Bernanos
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.

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
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