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
Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless.
Optimism has always seemed to me the cunning alibi of egoists, anxious to cover up their state of chronic self-satisfaction. They are optimists in order to avoid pitying other men and their misfortune. ~~ Yet pity is a vexed question.
Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.
I can now see to the bottom of my own depths, there is nothing stopping my gaze, no obstacle is in the way. And there is nothing there.
The most dangerous of our calculations are those we call illusions.
Optimism approves of everything, submits to everything, believes everything; it is the virtue above all of the taxpayer.
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?
[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.
Truth is meant to save you first. The comfort comes afterward.
The devil, you see, is that friend who never stays with us to the end.
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? It's so magnificent. God despises nothing. After all, if the deal had come off, Judas would probably have endowed sanatoriums, hospitals, public libraries or laboratories.
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.
The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.