Francois Mauriac Quotes

No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.

To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others.

We are, all of us, molded and remolded by those who have loved us, and though that love may pass, we remain none the less their work--a work that very likely they do not recognize, and which is never exactly what they intended.

If the flame inside you goes out, the souls that are next to you will die of cold.

Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.

That is the mystery of grace: it never comes too late.

Did you ever have a conversation with someone who misunderstood everything you had to say? It's exhausting, and the ironic part is that the more you try and explain yourself, the more mixed up things become. Your best friend knows when you're kidding, venting, and tired. He or she knows you and therefore doesn't read into the things you say.

Human love is often but the encounter of two weaknesses.

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.

If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.

Doubt is nothing but a trivial agitation on the surface of the soul, while deep down there is a calm certainty.

Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell.

God does not answer our desperate questionings; he simply gives us himself.

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

Men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed-off wings where he never ventures.

A man's passion for the mountain is, above all, his childhood which refuses to die.

There is no accident in our choice of reading. All our sources are related.

I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted. When I cease to be carried along, when I no longer feel as though I were taking down dictation, I stop.

The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.

The man who partakes in the breaking of the bread dares to build his house on the very core of love. He becomes, as it were, Godlike, but regardless of the strength he derives from it, his free will remains. We are always free to disown this immense grace, to abuse it. The Greatest Love may be betrayed. Fed on the Living Bread, we nevertheless conceal a part of ourselves which longs for swine's food.

We know well only what we are deprived of.

It seems that, after nineteen centuries of extraordinary glorification, the small Host for which so many cathedrals have sprung up, the small Host that has rested in millions of breasts and that has found a tabernacle and worshippers even in the desert - it seems that the triumphant Host of Lourdes and the Eucharistic Congresses of Chicago and Carthage remains as unknown, as secret as when it appeared for the first time in a room in Jerusalem. Light is in the world as in the days of St. John the Baptist, and the world does not know it

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

The grandeur of man lies in song, not in thought.

I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.