Georges Bernanos

Novelist, Essayist

Georges Bernanos was a French novelist known for his profound exploration of faith and human nature, particularly in 'Diary of a Country Priest.'

Born
February 20, 1888
Died
July 5, 1948
Quotes
68
Rank
#449

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Georges Bernanos Novelist, Essayist
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"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."

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"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."

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

Sin
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"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."

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

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

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"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."

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

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"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."

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

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"Like all truly pure souls she [Chantal] quickly resigned herself to past faults, thought only of how to repair whatever harm they had done. "Of all my daughters, you are certainly the least bothered by scruples of conscience," Abbé Chevance used to say.... Even sin, once the will is detached and no longer nourishes it, withers and dies sterile. It is in the secret of intentions, like in a decomposing humus, in the dark forest of future sins, unpardoned sins, half dead, half living, that new poisons are distilled."

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

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"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."

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"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!"

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"Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice?"

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

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"[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."

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"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."

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