Georges Bernanos Quotes

To be able to share in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness.

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

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.

It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.

Faith is not a thing which one loses, we merely cease to shape our lives by it.

...the most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre.

Hope is a risk that must be run.

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

Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humilation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for-the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.

The world is eaten up by boredom. You can't see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is sifted so fine, it doesn't even grit on your teeth. But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands.

The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.

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

Sadness came into the world with Satan - that world our Saviour never prayed for, the world you say I do not know. Oh, it is not so difficult to recognize: it is the world that prefers cold to warmth! What can God find to say to those who, of their own free will, of their own weight incline towards sadness and turn instinctively towards the night?

A man given to vice is always an idealist.

Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.

The devil, you see, is that friend who never stays with us to the end.

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.

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

Hell, madame, is to love no longer.

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

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

No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.

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.

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.

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