Quotes from Georges Bernanos

No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

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

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.

God ordains that beggars should beg for greatness, as for all else, when greatness shines out of them, and they don't know it.

[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.

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

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

There is nothing that God hates so much as a liar.

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

Hope is a risk that must be run.

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

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

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

All her life she [Chantal] had been carefully, heroically watching over mediocre beings who were hardly real, over things of no value.

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

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

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

Hell, madame, is to love no longer.

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

Hell is not to love anymore.

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

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.

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

There is nothing that God hates so much as a liar.