Quotes by Georges Bernanos

“Hope is a risk that must be run”

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

“I know the compassion of others is a relief at first. I dont despise it. But it cant 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.”

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

“When you think of the huge uninterrupted success of a book like Don Quixote, youre 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!”

“And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning -- enemies of society, as you call them. Youre kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of Gods justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient its easy enough for you to put it on one side. Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more!”

“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.”

“Fact is Our Lord knew all about the power of money: He gave capitalism a tiny niche in His scheme of things, He gave it a chance, He even provided a first installment of funds. Can you beat that? Its so magnificent. God despises nothing. After all, if the deal had come off, Judas would probably have endowed sanatoriums, hospitals, public libraries or laboratories.”

“Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterward.”

“No one ever discovers the depths of his own loneliness.”

Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: Do likewise. The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.

And now she was thinking of her own death, with her heart gripped not by fear but by the excitement of a great discovery, the feeling that she was about to learn what she had been unable to learn from her brief experience of love. What she thought about death was childish, but what could never have touched her in the past now filled her with poignant tenderness, as sometimes a familiar face we see suddenly with the eyes of love makes us aware that it has been dearer to us than life itself for longer than we have ever realized.

The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.

A Christian people doesnt mean a lot of goody-goodies. The Church has plenty of stamina, and isnt afraid of sin. On the contrary, she can look it in the face calmly and even take it upon herself, assume it at times, as Our Lord did. When a good workmans been at it for a whole week, surely hes due for a booze on Saturday night. Look: Ill define you a Christian people by the opposite. The opposite of a Christian people is a people grown sad and old. Youll be saying that isnt a very theological definition. I agree...Why does our earliest childhood always seem so soft and full of light? A kids got plenty of troubles, like everybody else, and hes really so very helpless, quite unarmed against pain and illness. Childhood and old age should be the two greatest trials of mankind. But that very sense of powerlessness is the mainspring of a childs joy. He just leaves it all to his mother, you see. Present, past, future -- his whole life is caught up in one look, and that look is a smile. Well, lad, if only theyd let us have our way, the Church might have given men that supreme comfort. Of course theyd each have their own worries to grapple with, just the same. Hunger, thirst, poverty, jealousy -- wed never be able to pocket the devil once and for all, you may be sure. But man would have known he was the son of God; and therein lies your miracle. Hed have lived, hed have died with that idea in his noddle -- and not just a notion picked up in books either -- oh, no! Because wed have made that idea the basis of everything: habits and customs, relaxation and pleasure, down to the very simplest needs. That wouldnt have stopped the labourer ploughing, or the scientist swotting at his logarithms, or even the engineer making his playthings for grown-up people. What we would have got rid of, what we would have torn from the very heart of Adam, is that sense of his own loneliness...God has entrusted the Church to keep [the soul of childhood] alive, to safeguard our candour and freshness... Joy is the gift of the Church, whatever joy is possible for this sad world to share... What would it profit you even to create life itself, when you have lost all sense of what life really is?

O miracle—thus to be able to give [peace] we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands!

We pay a heavy, very heavy price for the superhuman dignity of our calling. The ridiculous is always so near to the sublime. And the world, usually so indulgent to foibles, hates ours instinctively.

The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort. If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with his shadow, or even less—a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people find until their dying day, I wont even say such great comfort—since they put no faith in the solace of the senses—but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer? Oh, of course—suggestion, say the scientists. Certainly they can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgement, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!This seems a very daring comparison. I apologise for having advanced it, yet perhaps it might satisfy many people who find it hard to think for themselves, unless the thought has first been jolted by some unexpected, surprising image. Could a sane man set himself up as a judge of music because he has sometimes touched a keyboard with the tips of his fingers? And surely if a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony leave him cold, if he has to content himself with watching on the face of another listener the reflected pleasure of supreme, inaccessible delight, such a man has only himself to blame.But alas! We take the psychiatrists word for it. The unanimous testimony of saints is held as of little or no account. They may all affirm that this kind of deepening of the spirit is unlike any other experience, that instead of showing us more and more of our own complexity it ends in sudden total illumination, opening out upon azure light—they can be dismissed with a few shrugs. Yet when has any man of prayer told us that prayer had failed him?

Teaching is no joke, sonny! ... Comforting truths, they call it! Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards. Besides, youve no right to call that sort of thing comfort. Might as well talk about condolences! The Word of God is a red-hot iron. And you who preach it ud go picking it up with a pair of tongs, for fear of burning yourself, you darent get hold of it with both hands. Its too funny! Why, the priest who descends from the pulpit of Truth, with a mouth like a hens vent, a little hot but pleased with himself, hes not been preaching: at best hes been purring like a tabby-cat. Mind you that can happen to us all, were all half asleep, its the devil to wake us up, sometimes — the apostles slept all right at Gethsemane. Still, theres a difference... And mind you many a fellow who waves his arms and sweats like a furniture-remover isnt necessarily any more awakened than the rest. On the contrary. I simply mean that when the Lord has drawn from me some word for the good of souls, I know, because of the pain of it.

His face frankly displays his suffering, expressing it with a truly royal simplicity. At such moments even the very best people are apt to give themselves away with the kind of look which says to you more or less directly: You see how Im sticking it out; dont praise me, its my nature; thanks all the same. But the Curé de Torcy looks straight at you, guilelessly. His eyes beg your compassion and sympathy. But with what nobility they beg! A king might beg in just that way.

The work God carries out in us, he said after a short pause, is not often what we expect. A great deal of the time the Holy Spirit seems to be working backward in us and wasting time. If a lump of iron could form an idea of the file thats slowly rough-shaping it, how furious it would be! Yet thats how God shapes us. Certain saints lives seem horribly monotonous and desolate.