Top 66 Bernanos Quotes
#1. The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, insubordinate, untamable men are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increase in the number of obedient, docile men. - George Bernanos
Georges Bernanos
#2. The most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre.
Georges Bernanos
#3. [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.
Georges Bernanos
#4. 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
#5. The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
Georges Bernanos
#6. 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
#7. Optimism approves of everything, submits to everything, believes everything; it is the virtue above all of the taxpayer.
Georges Bernanos
#9. The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.
Georges Bernanos
#11. 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
#13. I have no ambition to change my nature, I merely intend to conquer my dislikes.
Georges Bernanos
#15. There remains the unforseen. And the unforseen is never negligible.
Georges Bernanos
#16. 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
#17. Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.
Georges Bernanos
#18. Our habits are our friends. Even our bad habits.
Diary of a Country Priest
Georges Bernanos
#20. We pay a heavy, very heavy price for the superhuman dignity of our calling. The ridiculous is always so near to the sublime. And the world, usually so indulgent to foibles, hates ours instinctively.
Georges Bernanos
#21. 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?
Georges Bernanos
#22. How easy it is to hate oneself! True grace is to forget. Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity - as one would love any one of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ.
Georges Bernanos
#23. 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
#25. 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
#27. Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.
Georges Bernanos
#28. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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.
Georges Bernanos
#33. Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it.
Georges Bernanos
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. [A]ll her life she [Chantal] had been carefully, heroically watching over mediocre beings who were hardly real, over things of no value.
Georges Bernanos
#37. God! how is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?
Georges Bernanos
#38. God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best.
Georges Bernanos
#41. A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.
Georges Bernanos
#42. Void fascinates those who daren't look into it. They throw themselves in, for fear of falling.
Georges Bernanos
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it.
Georges Bernanos
#46. O miracle - thus to be able to give [peace] we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands!
Georges Bernanos
#47. The devil, you see, is that friend who never stays with us to the end.
Georges Bernanos
#48. Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.
Georges Bernanos
#49. The most dangerous of our calculations are those we call illusions.
Georges Bernanos
#50. Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.
Georges Bernanos
#51. 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.
Georges Bernanos
#53. 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
#54. Truth is meant to save you first. The comfort comes afterward.
Georges Bernanos
#55. It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.
Georges Bernanos
#56. 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.
Georges Bernanos
#57. 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.
Georges Bernanos
#58. It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man.
Georges Bernanos
#60. Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterward.
Georges Bernanos
#61. Appearances are nothing ... And first of all they should not be feared, they are only dangerous to the weak.
Georges Bernanos
#62. You owe it to everyone you love to find pockets of tranquility in your busy world.
Georges Bernanos
#63. To be able to share in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness.
Georges Bernanos
#64. ...men are as vulnerable to joy as they are to suffering.
Michel Bernanos
#65. [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.
Georges Bernanos
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