Quotes from Gabriel Chevallier

I have noticed that the bravest are the ones most lacking in imagination and sensitivity. This is understandable. If life had not already accustomed the men in the front lines to resignation and the passive obedience of the humble, they would run away. And if those defending the front were highly strung intellectuals, the war would soon become impossible.

You don't by chance believe that the war has killed all the halfwits? They belong to a race that will never die out. I'm sure there was a halfwit in Noah's Ark and he was the most prolific male on God's blessed raft!

Men's opinions are based on the size of their bank balance. To have or not to have, as Shakespeare would say.' 'Before

Let me give you the balance sheet of this war: fifty great men to go down in the annals of history; millions of dead who won't be mentioned any more; and one thousand millionaires who lay down the law. A soldier's life is worth about fifty francs in the wallet of some fat industrialist in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Vienna or anywhere else. Are you getting the picture?' 'So

So, in order to be courageous, I now have a fairly simple means at my disposal: to accept death.

If there was one last place in which it was possible to escape the riff-raff of humanity, it was Heaven.

Here everything is planned for killing. The ground is ready to receive us, the bullets are ready to hit us, the spots where the shells will explode are fixed in time and space, just like the paths of our destiny which will inevitably lead us to them. And yet we want to stay alive and we use all our mental strength to silence the voice of reason. We are well aware that death does not immortalise a human being in the memories of the living, it simply cancels him out.

I had been astonished to find myself in the middle of the war yet not be able to find it, unable to accept that in fact the war consisted precisely of this stasis.

Since the damage was so small, people were more inclined to laugh that Cudoine should have his ugly mug bashed in. No one had any particular grievance against him, but there was a town major's manner about him that was rather irritating. He looked too pleased with himself, and at Clochemerle this was not popular.

In a small community sex constitutes the most accessible and least extravagant pastime of all, rustic love being rarely mercenary.

As everyone knows, people revert to virtuous ways when they are too old for their virtue to be endangered. The confessor was not deceived by any of these women who repented out of impotence or malice and were inclined to criticize in others the very aberrations of which they themselves had formerly been guilty.

If sharing meant receiving, well and good, but if it was a question of giving, then to hell with it, the Clochemerlins would cry out in chorus. Sad to relate, these bumpkins knew nothing about Hegel or Marx. They each had their little patch of ground inherited from previous generations, their trade secrets handed down from father to son, and they could see no farther.

The Church should adapt itself to the manners of the time, since it seems only too clear that the manners of the time adapt themselves less and less to the Church.

Some of his colleagues, as he was well aware, even went so far as to say he dishonoured the medical profession. As though it could be dishonoured! There is pain and sickness, agreed. But pain and sickness represent money, and you need money to live, to feel well and look after others. That is the inevitable cycle. When it comes to money, it is difficult to strike a happy mean and stick to it. You either make too much money, or too little. It is safer to make too much.

What saves doctors' reputations is the fact that many illnesses are benign and that people can go on living with a large number of others, the so-called chronic ones, which destroy only slowly.

It was as though the world had had a fresh coat of paint, and every heart acquired a store of illusions that made the burden of life less hard to bear.

At Clochemerle, the greater number of the men put up with their wives, and the great majority of the women with their husbands. If this hardly amounted to adoration, in the majority of homes at any rate the men and women found each other very nearly endurable.

The Church needs a firm hierarchy and is forced to distrust such of her underlings as show a tendency to become too holy.

During several centuries Clochemerle, far from the cities and trade routes, had lived in stillness and isolation. But now, at last, the clamour of the great world was crossing the invisible barrier, bringing doubts, temptations, and discontents.

Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence.

For the wine of Clochemerle is at once exquisite and treacherous; it charms first the nose, then the palate, finally the entire man. Mark well that if it makes a man drunk it does not do so malignantly. It produces an enchanting light-heartedness, an intellectual sparkle which liberates the drinker from the constraints and conventions which bind him in his daily life.

They had also brought in a piece of human scrap so monstrous that everyone recoiled at the sight, that it shocked men who were no longer shockable. I shut my eyes; I had already seen far too much and I wanted to be able to forget eventually. This thing, this being, screamed in a corner like a maniac. The revulsion that turned our stomachs told us that it would be an act of generosity, a fraternal act, to finish him off.

The Clochemerle 1929 was a magnificent wine. Drinking it in small sips, his grace the Archbishop felt himself well disposed towards the Clochemerlins. It takes all sorts to make a world and a Church, to people Heaven and Hell. But there was no denying that it took capable vignerons to make a wine like this, men whose minds must on no account be distracted by excessive metaphysical cares.

Alas, God's poor ministers are just as much in the dark as we are. You must believe like old women believe, the ones that look like witches, who mumble to themselves in churches under the nose of cheap, plaster saints. As soon as you start to use your reason, to look for a rainbow, you always run up against the great excuse, mystery. You will be advised to light some candles, put coins in the box, say a few rosaries, and make yourself stupid.