Georges Bernanos Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Georges Bernanos quote about:
- Hell,
- Justice,
- Literature,
- Prayer,
- Soul,
-
“It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“You owe it to everyone you love to find pockets of tranquility in your busy world.”
-- Georges Bernanos -
“The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.”
-- Georges Bernanos -
“Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“To be able to share in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness.”
-- 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 -
“It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man.”
-- Georges Bernanos -
“Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it.”
-- Georges Bernanos -
“Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.”
-- Georges Bernanos -
“No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.”
-- Georges Bernanos -
“Appearances are nothing.... And first of all they should not be feared, they are only dangerous to the weak.”
-- Georges Bernanos -
“[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 -
“Only the present counts.”
-- Georges Bernanos -
“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 -
“[F]irst of all, be what you are.”
-- Georges Bernanos -
“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.”
-- Georges Bernanos
