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
The worst, the most corrupting of lies, are problems poorly stated,
It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.
The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.
The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.
Suicide only really frightens those who are never tempted by it and never will be, for its darkness only welcomes those who are predestined to it.
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.
Hell is not to love anymore.
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.
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.
[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.
...the most dangerous shortsightedness consists in underestimating the mediocre.
God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best.
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!