French author (1888-1948)
Joy is in the gift of the Church; whatever joy is possible for this sad world to share. Whatever you did against the Church, has been done against joy. I'm not stopping you from calculating the procession of the equinoxes or splitting the atom. But what would it profit you even to create life itself, when you have lost all sense of what life really is?
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest
Hell is not to love any more, madame. Not to love any more!
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest
Democracies cannot dispense with hypocrisy any more than dictatorships can with cynicism.
GEORGES BERNANOS
We French
Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos
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.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Joy
With the decline or disappearance of other powers, the priest, even though appearing so intimately integrated into the life of society, has become a more singular and unclassifiable being than any of those old magicians the ancient world used to keep locked up like sacred animals in the depths of its temples, existing in the intimacy of the gods alone.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Monsieur Ouine
The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Last Essays
The most dangerous of our calculations are those we call illusions.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Dialogue des Carmélites
Fear, true fear, is a savage frenzy. Of all the insanities of which we are capable, it is surely the cruelest. There is naught to equal its drive, and naught can survive its thrust.
GEORGES BERNANOS
A Diary of My Times
Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless.
GEORGES BERNANOS
A Diary of My Times
I don't think we can ever learn much from ultra-sensitive, shifty faces, skilled in disguise, that hide themselves in lust, as beasts hide to die.
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest
The discreet slaughter of fifteen or twenty wretched people per day will not prevent tramways from running to schedule, cafés from being full, or churches resounding with the Te Deum.
GEORGES BERNANOS
A Diary of My Times
Do you think what we call chance is really just the logic of God?
GEORGES BERNANOS
Dialogues des Carmélites
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?
GEORGES BERNANOS
The Diary of a Country Priest
My secret demon is called: What's the use?
GEORGES BERNANOS
A Diary of My Times
A man given to vice is always an idealist.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Monsieur Ouine
They are always talking about the fire of hell, but no one has ever seen it, my friends. For hell is cold. It used to be that the nights weren't long enough to wear out your malice, and you got up each morning with your breasts still full of poison. But now the devil himself has withdrawn from you. Ah, how alone we are in evil, my brothers! The poor human race dreams from century to century of breaking that solitude -- but it's no use! The devil, who can do so many things, will never succeed in founding a Church, a Church that will put in common both the merits of hell and the sin of all. From now until the end of the world, the sinner will have to sin alone, always alone -- for just as we die alone, so also do we sin alone. The devil, you see, is the friend who never stays with us to the end.
GEORGES BERNANOS
Monsieur Ouine