Quotes from bernanos georges ii

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.

I have just discovered something I have always known: we can no more escape from one another than we can escape from God.

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

The wish to pray is a prayer in itself. God can ask no more than that of us.

How is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?

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.

Love is a free choice or it is nothing at all.

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.

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?

Democracies cannot dispense with hypocrisy any more than dictatorships can with cynicism.

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

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.

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.

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.