Top 50 Georges Bernanos Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “What does it matter, all is grace.”

— Georges Bernanos

2. “The horrors that we have seen, the still greater horrors we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, insubordinate, untamable men are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increase in the number of obedient, docile men. – George Bernanos.”

— Georges Bernanos

3. “You owe it to everyone you love to find pockets of tranquility in your busy world.”

— Georges Bernanos

4. “Hope is a risk that must be run.”

— Georges Bernanos

5. “To be able to share in another’s joy, that is the secret of happiness.”

— Georges Bernanos

6. “Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather, at the very source of its life! To confound this lust in man with that desire which unites the sexes is like confusing a tumor with the very organ which it devours, a tumor whose very deformity horribly reproduces the shape.”

— Georges Bernanos

7. “The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.”

— Georges Bernanos

8. “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.”

— Georges Bernanos

9. “What does the truth matter? Haven’t we mothers all given our sons a taste for lies, lies which from the cradle upwards lull them, reassure them, send them to sleep: lies as soft and warm as a breast!”

— Georges Bernanos

10. “Hell is not to love anymore.”

— Georges Bernanos

11. “The world is eaten up by boredom. You can’t see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is sifted so fine, it doesn’t even grit on your teeth. But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands.”

— Georges Bernanos

12. “The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more.”

— Georges Bernanos

13. “The devil, you see, is that friend who never stays with us to the end.”

— Georges Bernanos

14. “But I shall give less thought to the future, I shall work in the present. I feel such work is within my power. For I only succeed in small things, and when I am tried by anxiety, I am bound to say it is the small joys that release me.”

— Georges Bernanos

15. “The most dangerous of our calculations are those we call illusions.”

— Georges Bernanos

16. “God! how is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?”

— Georges Bernanos

17. “Faith is not a thing which one loses, we merely cease to shape our lives by it.”

— Georges Bernanos

18. “Truth is meant to save you first. The comfort comes afterward.”

— Georges Bernanos

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

19. “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 that’s slowly rough-shaping it, how furious it would be! Yet that’s how God shapes us. Certain saints’ lives seem horribly monotonous and desolate.”

— Georges Bernanos

20. “Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.”

— Georges Bernanos

21. “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?”

— Georges Bernanos

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

— Georges Bernanos

23. “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.”

— Georges Bernanos

24. “Fear, true fear, is a savage frenzy. Of all the insanities of which we are capable, it is surely the cruelest. There is naught to equal its drive, and naught can survive its thrust.”

— Georges Bernanos

25. “Only the present counts.”

— Georges Bernanos

26. “I know the compassion of others is a relief at first. I don’t despise it. But it can’t 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.”

— Georges Bernanos

27. “God ordains that beggars should beg for greatness, as for all else, when greatness shines out of them, and they don’t know it.”

— Georges Bernanos

28. “Optimism approves of everything, submits to everything, believes everything; it is the virtue above all of the taxpayer.”

— Georges Bernanos

29. “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?”

— Georges Bernanos

30. “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.”

— Georges Bernanos

31. “Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.”

— Georges Bernanos

32. “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.”

— Georges Bernanos

33. “Nothing but a little savage...”

— Georges Bernanos

34. “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!”

— Georges Bernanos

35. “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.”

— Georges Bernanos

36. “Rather than the obsession with impurity, you’d do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.”

— Georges Bernanos

37. “Those who still profess the rule of hope, teach optimism only by force of habit, without believing in what they say.”

— Georges Bernanos

38. “I have just discovered something I have always known: we can no more escape from one another than we can escape from God.”

— Georges Bernanos

39. “I have no ambition to change my nature, I merely intend to conquer my dislikes.”

— Georges Bernanos

40. “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.”

— Georges Bernanos

41. “I don’t think we can ever learn much from ultra-sensitive, shifty faces, skilled in disguise, that hide themselves in lust, as beasts hide to die.”

— Georges Bernanos

42. “God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best.”

— Georges Bernanos

43. “A man given to vice is always an idealist.”

— Georges Bernanos

44. “Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice?”

— Georges Bernanos

45. “Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless.”

— Georges Bernanos

46. “Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it.”

— Georges Bernanos

47. “I realize now that friendship can break out between two people, with that sudden violence which is only attributed to the revelation of love.”

— Georges Bernanos

48. “I believe, in fact I am certain, that many men never give out the whole of themselves, their deepest truth. They live on the surface, and yet, so rich is the soil of humanity that even this thin outer layer is able to yield a kind of meager harvest which gives the illusion of real living.”

— Georges Bernanos

49. “Well, as I was saying, the world is eaten up by boredom. To perceive this needs a little preliminary thought: you can’t see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is sifted so fine, it doesn’t even grit on your teeth. But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be forever on the go. And so, people are always “on the go.”

— Georges Bernanos

50. “Nowadays the seminaries turn out little choirboys, little ragamuffins who think they’re working harder than anybody because they never get anything done.”

— Georges Bernanos