Georges Bernanos
[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.Collection: Cradle
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?Collection: Writing
What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on their first flight are hardly so hovered around.Collection: Teenage
Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice?Collection: Powerful
Like all truly pure souls she [Chantal] quickly resigned herself to past faults, thought only of how to repair whatever harm they had done. "Of all my daughters, you are certainly the least bothered by scruples of conscience," Abbé Chevance used to say.... Even sin, once the will is detached and no longer nourishes it, withers and dies sterile. It is in the secret of intentions, like in a decomposing humus, in the dark forest of future sins, unpardoned sins, half dead, half living, that new poisons are distilled.Collection: Daughter
The most dangerous of our calculations are those we call illusions.Collection: Illusion
All her life she [Chantal] had been carefully, heroically watching over mediocre beings who were hardly real, over things of no value.Collection: Real
More often than not, nothingness is reluctantly and despairingly taken to be the only hypothesis possible when all the others have failed, since by definition it cannot be disproven and is beyond the scope of reason.Collection: Taken
A large number of suspects, both men and women, escaped martial law for lack of any shred of evidence against them on which a court-martial could convict. So they began setting them free in groups, according to their birth-place. But half-way, the car-load would be emptied into a ditch.Collection: Men
Le de s ir de la prie' re est de j a' une prie' re. The wish for prayer is already a prayer.Collection: Prayer
What does it matter, all is grace.Collection: Grace
God ordains that beggars should beg for greatness, as for all else, when greatness shines out of them, and they don't know it.Collection: Greatness
Have you never been moved by poor men's fidelity, the image of you they form in their simple minds? Why should you always talk of their envy, without understanding that what they ask of you is not so much your worldly goods, as something very hard to define, which they themselves can put no name to; yet at times it consoles their loneliness; a dream of splendor, of magnificence, a tawdry dream, a poor man's dream -and yet God blesses it!Collection: Dream
God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best.Collection: Despise
The contradictions in Renan , his feminine sensibility, coquetry, unavowed egotism, and sudden emotional outbursts, all indicate a soul deliberately using distraction as a means of evasion. The perpetual equivocation bears witness to God in the same way as the twisting and turning of a hunted animal indicates the presence of an unseen hunter.Collection: Mean
If hell has no answer for the questioning dead, it is not because it refuses to answer (for rigorous, alas, in observance, is the imperishable fire), but it is because hell has nothing to say, will say nothing eternally.Collection: Fire
When you think of the huge uninterrupted success of a book like Don Quixote, you're bound to realize that if humankind have not yet finished being revenged, by sheer laughter, for being let down in their greatest hope, it is because that hope was cherished so long and lay so deep!Collection: Laughter
Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.Collection: Daughter
Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless.Collection: Quality
Truth is meant to save you first. The comfort comes afterward.Collection: Firsts