"A man given to vice is always an idealist."
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Quote collection
Georges Bernanos quotes (page 3 of 4)
68 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"The contradictions in Renan , his feminine sensibility, coquetry, unavowed egotism, and sudden emotional outbursts, all indicate a soul deliberately using distraction as a means of evasion. The perpetual equivocation bears witness to God in the same way as the twisting and turning of a hunted animal indicates the presence of an unseen hunter."
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"There is nothing that God hates so much as a liar."
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"God! how is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?"
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"To be able to share in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness."
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"Le de s ir de la prie' re est de j a' une prie' re. The wish for prayer is already a prayer."
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"Only the present counts."
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"Appearances are nothing.... And first of all they should not be feared, they are only dangerous to the weak."
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"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?"
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"First of all, be what you are."
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"[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave."
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"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?"
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"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."
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"Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity."
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"Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless."
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"All her life she [Chantal] had been carefully, heroically watching over mediocre beings who were hardly real, over things of no value."
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"The most dangerous of our calculations are those we call illusions."
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"Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright."
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"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."
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