Georges Bernanos quotes

Georges Bernanos was a French author and essayist, celebrated for his profound Catholic themes and psychological depth. His works explore the struggle between good and evil within the human soul. He influenced 20th-century literature with his spiritual insight and passionate opposition to injustice. Here are 61 of his quotes:

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

Georges Bernanos

A man given to vice is always an idealist.

Georges Bernanos

[A] good Christian does not care for miracles very much, because a miracle is God looking after His own affairs, and we prefer looking after them for Him.

Georges Bernanos

[P]ride has no intrinsic substance, being no more than the name given to the soul devouring itself. When that loathsome perversion of love has borne its fruit, it has another, more meaningful and weightier name. We call it hatred.

Georges Bernanos

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

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.

Georges Bernanos

[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.

Georges Bernanos

Only the present counts.

Georges Bernanos

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

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

Georges Bernanos

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.

Georges Bernanos

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

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

Georges Bernanos

Appearances are nothing.... And first of all they should not be feared, they are only dangerous to the weak.

Georges Bernanos

Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.

Georges Bernanos

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

Georges Bernanos

[T]here is nothing that God hates so much as a liar.

Georges Bernanos

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

Georges Bernanos

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

Georges Bernanos

To you a pious young girl who goes to mass and communion, seems pretty silly and childish; you take us for innocents... Well, let me tell you, sometimes we know more about evil than people who have only learned to offend God.

Georges Bernanos

First of all, be what you are.

Georges Bernanos

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