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
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.
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest
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
Joy
How is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?
GEORGES BERNANOS
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.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Monsieur Ouine
The wish to pray is a prayer in itself. God can ask no more than that of us.
GEORGES BERNANOS
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.
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest
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.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Monsieur Ouine
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.
GEORGES BERNANOS
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.
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Impostor
Love is a free choice or it is nothing at all.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Last Essays
Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it.
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest
Our habits are our friends. Even our bad habits.
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest
The cradle is shallower than the grave.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Monsieur Ouine
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.
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest
Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.
GEORGES BERNANOS
A Diary of My Times
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.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Heroic Face of Innocence: Three Stories
Bad dreams are a heavy weight to carry.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Night is Darkest
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
Joy
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?
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest