Georges Bernanos Quotes & Sayings

Nothing but a little savage... — Georges Bernanos

God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best. — Georges Bernanos

Hell, madam, is to love no longer. — Georges Bernanos

Do you think chance is really just the logic of God? — Georges Bernanos

[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

Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses. — Georges Bernanos

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

It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man. — Georges Bernanos

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

To be able to share in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness. — Georges Bernanos

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

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

We priests are sneered at and always shall be - the accusation is such an easy one - as deeply envious, hypocritical haters of virility. Yet whosoever has experienced sin must know that lust, with its parasitic growth, is for ever threatening to stifle virility as well as intelligence. Impotent to create, it can only contaminate in the germ the frail promise of humanity; it is probably at the very source, the primal cause of all human blemishes; and when amid the windings of this huge jungle whose paths are unknown, we encounter Lust, just as she is, as she emerged forth from the hands of the Master of Prodigies, the cry from our hearts is not only terror but imprecation: 'You, you alone have set death loose upon the world! — 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

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

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

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

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

Only the present counts. — Georges Bernanos

Void fascinates those who daren't look into it. They throw themselves in, for fear of falling. — Georges Bernanos

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

Truth is meant to save you first. The comfort comes afterward. — Georges Bernanos

For those who have the habit of prayer, thought is too often a mere alibi, a sly way of deciding to do what one wants to do. Reason will always obscure what we wish to keep in the shadows. A worldling can think out the pros and cons and sum up his chances. No doubt. But what are our chances worth? We who have admitted once and for all into each moment of our puny lives the terrifying presence of God? ... What is the use of working out chances? There are no chances against God. — 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

Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.
Diary of a Country Priest — Georges Bernanos

What does it matter, all is grace. — Georges Bernanos

Hope is a risk that must be run. — Georges Bernanos

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

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

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

A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread. — Georges Bernanos

And now she was thinking of her own death, with her heart gripped not by fear but by the excitement of a great discovery, the feeling that she was about to learn what she had been unable to learn from her brief experience of love. What she thought about death was childish, but what could never have touched her in the past now filled her with poignant tenderness, as sometimes a familiar face we see suddenly with the eyes of love makes us aware that it has been dearer to us than life itself for longer than we have ever realized. — Georges Bernanos

No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness. — 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

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

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

Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity. — Georges Bernanos

The work God carries out in us,' he said after a short pause, 'is not often what we expect. A great deal of the time the Holy Spirit seems to be working backward in us and wasting time. If a lump of iron could form an idea of the file that's slowly rough-shaping it, how furious it would be! Yet that's how God shapes us. Certain saints' lives seem horribly monotonous and desolate. — Georges Bernanos

Hell, madame, is to love no longer. — Georges Bernanos

Appearances are nothing ... And first of all they should not be feared, they are only dangerous to the weak. — Georges Bernanos

The most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre. — 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

The most dangerous of our calculations are those we call illusions. — Georges Bernanos

The wish to pray is a prayer in itself. — Georges Bernanos

[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

[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

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

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

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it. — Georges Bernanos

Sadness came into the world with Satan that world our Saviour never prayed for, the world you say I do not know. Oh, it is not so difficult to recognize: it is the world that prefers cold to warmth! What can God find to say to those who, of their own free will, of their own weight incline towards sadness and turn instinctively towards the night? — Georges Bernanos

Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterward. — Georges Bernanos

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

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 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

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

O miracle - thus to be able to give [peace] we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands! — 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

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

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. — Georges Bernanos

It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so. — Georges Bernanos

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means. — Georges Bernanos

Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright. — Georges Bernanos

Our habits are our friends. Even our bad habits.
Diary of a Country Priest — Georges Bernanos

[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave. — Georges Bernanos

Hell is not to love anymore. — Georges Bernanos

[T]here is nothing that God hates so much as a liar. — Georges Bernanos

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

There remains the unforseen. And the unforseen is never negligible. — Georges Bernanos

You owe it to everyone you love to find pockets of tranquility in your busy world. — Georges Bernanos

And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning - enemies of society, as you call them. You're kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of God's justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient it's easy enough for you to put it on one side. Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more! — Georges Bernanos

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. — Georges Bernanos

The expression 'to lose one's faith', as one might a purse or a ring of keys, has always seemed to me rather foolish. It must be one of those sayings of bourgeois piety, a legacy of those wretched priests of the eighteenth century who talked so much.

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it. That is why old-fashioned confessors are not far wrong in showing a certain amount of scepticism when dealing with 'intellectual crises', doubtless far more rare than people imagine. An educated man may come by degrees to tuck away his faith in some back corner of his brain, where he can find it again on reflection, by an effort of memory: yet even if he feels a tender regret for what no longer exists and might have been, the term 'faith' would nevertheless be inapplicable to such an abstraction, no more like real faith, to use a very well-worn simile, than the constellation of Cygne is like a swan. — Georges Bernanos

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

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

Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air. — Georges Bernanos

[F]irst of all, be what you are. — 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

I have no ambition to change my nature, I merely intend to conquer my dislikes. — Georges Bernanos