Georges Bernanos
Georges Bernanos
Georges Bernanoswas a French author, and a soldier in World War I. Of Roman Catholic and monarchist leanings, he was critical of bourgeois thought and was opposed to what he identified as defeatism. He thought this led to France's eventual occupation by Germany in 1940 during World War II. Most of his novels have been translated into English and frequently published in both Great Britain and the United States...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth20 February 1888
CountryFrance
Appearances are nothing.... And first of all they should not be feared, they are only dangerous to the weak.
[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.
Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.
...the most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre.
I have done no passably decent job in this world which did not at first seem to me useless - absurdly useless, useless to the point of nausea. My secret demon is called:;: What's the use?
God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best.
[T]here is nothing that God hates so much as a liar.
Hell, madame, is to love no longer.
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!
[P]ride has no intrinsic substance, being no more than the name given to the soul devouring itself. When that loathsome perversion of love has borne its fruit, it has another, more meaningful and weightier name. We call it hatred.
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.
Le de s ir de la prie' re est de j a' une prie' re. The wish for prayer is already a prayer.
Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.
The wish to pray is a prayer in itself. God can ask no more than that of us.