G Bernanos Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that I am alone, that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, "the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly." Your job, it seems, would be to find a crack through which some sort of communication can be made, one soul to another. — Phil Klay

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

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

[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

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

...men are as vulnerable to joy as they are to suffering. — Michel Bernanos