French author (1888-1948)
Optimism approves of everything, submits to everything, believes everything; it is the virtue above all of the taxpayer.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Last Essays
There's no hatred that can ever be satisfied either in this world or the next, and the hatred that one has for oneself is probably the one for which there is no forgiveness.
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Monsieur Ouine
I have just discovered something I have always known: we can no more escape from one another than we can escape from God.
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Joy
The world of sin faces the world of grace like the reflected image of a landscape on the edge of a dark, deep stretch of water.
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The Diary of a Country Priest
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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The Diary of a Country Priest
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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The Diary of a Country Priest
The cradle is shallower than the grave.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Monsieur Ouine
The wish to pray is a prayer in itself. God can ask no more than that of us.
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The Diary of a Country Priest
The hour is coming when, on the ruins of the old Christian order, a new order will be born that will indeed be an order of the world, the order of the Prince of this World, of that prince whose kingdom is of this world. And the hard law of necessity, stronger than any illusions, will then remove the very object for clerical pride so long maintained simply by conventions outlasting any belief. And the footsteps of beggars shall cause the earth to tremble once again.
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Monsieur Ouine
Love is a free choice or it is nothing at all.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Last Essays
Hope is almost dead in you, forever. All that's left of it is that last gleam, without which any task is impossible and any merit vain. That's what really matters -- the absence of hope. Everything else is nothing.
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Under Satan's Sun
The idea that Satan is purely a logician is an illusion held by not a few naive people. Many a shifty old man sees him as an opponent in an academic argument, but if he does the observer is still at the stage of games and trifles. Sometimes, though not often, the black desire to harm wins out over quicker and less bitter delights. When that happens, evil shows itself for what it truly is, not a way of life, but an attack on life itself.
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The Impostor
Our habits are our friends. Even our bad habits.
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The Diary of a Country Priest
In one way fear is also God's daughter, redeemed on the night of Holy Friday. She is not beautiful to look at -- oh no! -- ridiculed at times, at others cursed, disowned by everyone ... and yet, make no mistake about it, she is present at every deathbed--she is man's intercessor.
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Heroic Face of Innocence: Three Stories
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 instalment 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.
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The Diary of a Country Priest
Democracies cannot dispense with hypocrisy any more than dictatorships can with cynicism.
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We French
Joy is in the gift of the Church; whatever joy is possible for this sad world to share. Whatever you did against the Church, has been done against joy. I'm not stopping you from calculating the procession of the equinoxes or splitting the atom. But what would it profit you even to create life itself, when you have lost all sense of what life really is?
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The Diary of a Country Priest
Do you think what we call chance is really just the logic of God?
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Dialogues des Carmélites
Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it.
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The Diary of a Country Priest
The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Last Essays