Top 72 Quotes & Sayings by Georges Bernanos - Page 2

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

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

The contradictions in Renan , his feminine sensibility, coquetry, unavowed egotism, and sudden emotional outbursts, all indicate a soul deliberately using distraction as a means of evasion. The perpetual equivocation bears witness to God in the same way as the twisting and turning of a hunted animal indicates the presence of an unseen hunter.

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

Have you never been moved by poor men's fidelity, the image of you they form in their simple minds? Why should you always talk of their envy, without understanding that what they ask of you is not so much your worldly goods, as something very hard to define, which they themselves can put no name to; yet at times it consoles their loneliness; a dream of splendor, of magnificence, a tawdry dream, a poor man's dream -and yet God blesses it!

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

All her life she [Chantal] had been carefully, heroically watching over mediocre beings who were hardly real, over things of no value.

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

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!

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.

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.

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