Georges Bernanos - The Diary of a Country Priest (1936)

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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
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
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
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.

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
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!

Georges Bernanos
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.

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

Georges Bernanos
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.

Georges Bernanos
It is one of the most mysterious penalties of men that they should be forced to confide the most precious of their possessions to things so unstable and ever changing, alas, as words.

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
The world is eaten up by boredom. To perceive this needs a little preliminary thought: 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. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be forever on the go.

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

Georges Bernanos
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.

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
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.

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

Georges Bernanos