Quotes from Georges Bernanos

Les ratés ne vous rateront pas.

But people talk too much. They talk and talk so much that when the time comes there's nothing left in their words. They're like the dust you raise when you're winnowing grain.

Men like us — up to a point — we're more careful when we're drunk. But once we get past that point, we don't give a damn.

She dared not ask Arsène to go more slowly for she had all the docility of the peasant woman, that docility which allows them to scold and insult the drunkard but nevertheless makes them trot at his side, adjusting their step to his.

The brutality of his voice reassured Mouchette more than any word of friendship would. She could only defend herself by immobility and silence.

He stopped suddenly, put his hand to his throat for a few minutes with his features fixed in a kind of stupid, hopeless searching look. Then his face brightened a little in spite of the anguish which he had doubtlessly forgotten.

What I am about to record would not reveal much to the only friend with whom I still manage to speak openly, and besides I know I could never bring myself to put on paper the things which almost every morning I confide to God without any shame.

Too many priests have held their tongues, and I wish it had only been from pity. But we're cowards.

You've not got much to say for yourself, but that's a nice change in a girl.

All the beatings she had suffered had not subjugated her, only taught her prudence and a calm and sly scorn for men's anger.

hunger now seemed a prolongation of physical well-being, a delicious drowsiness.

Even from the Cross, when Our Lord in His agony found the perfection of His Sacred Humanity—even then He did not own Himself a victim of injustice: They know not what they do.

The shabbiest tuppeny doll will rejoice a baby's heart for half the year, but your mature gentleman will go yawning his head off at a five-hundred-franc gadget. And why? Because he has lost the soul of childhood.

Suicide only really frightens those who are never tempted by it and never will be, for its darkness only welcomes those who are predestined to it.

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.

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

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.

It is one of the most mysterious penalties of men that they should be forced to confide the most precious of their possessions to things so unstable and ever changing, alas, as words .

When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears...

Our habits are our friends. Even our bad habits.

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

Il faut beaucoup de prodigues pour faire un peuple généreux, beaucoup d'indisciplinés pour faire un peuple libre, et beaucoup de jeunes fous pour faire un peuple héroïque

Void fascinates those who daren't look into it. They throw themselves in, for fear of falling.

Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.