François Mauriac quotes

François Mauriac was a renowned French novelist, essayist, and journalist, notable for his deeply psychological and Catholic-themed works. His literature often explored themes of faith, guilt, and human passion within the context of French society. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature and remains celebrated for his profound moral insight and emotional depth. Here are 38 of his quotes:

Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.

François Mauriac

Human love is often but the encounter of two weaknesses.

François Mauriac

Most men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed off wings where he never ventures.

François Mauriac

I love Germany so much I'm glad there are two of them.

François Mauriac

Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell.

François Mauriac

A man's passion for the mountain is, above all, his childhood which refuses to die.

François Mauriac

The man who partakes in the breaking of the bread dares to build his house on the very core of love. He becomes, as it were, Godlike, but regardless of the strength he derives from it, his free will remains. We are always free to disown this immense grace, to abuse it. The Greatest Love may be betrayed. Fed on the Living Bread, we nevertheless conceal a part of ourselves which longs for swine's food.

François Mauriac

If the flame inside you goes out, the souls that are next to you will die of cold.

François Mauriac

No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.

François Mauriac

That is the mystery of grace: it never comes too late.

François Mauriac

Did you ever have a conversation with someone who misunderstood everything you had to say? It's exhausting, and the ironic part is that the more you try and explain yourself, the more mixed up things become. Your best friend knows when you're kidding, venting, and tired. He or she knows you and therefore doesn't read into the things you say.

François Mauriac

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.

François Mauriac

If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.

François Mauriac

Doubt is nothing but a trivial agitation on the surface of the soul, while deep down there is a calm certainty.

François Mauriac

God does not answer our desperate questionings; he simply gives us himself.

François Mauriac

There is no accident in our choice of reading. All our sources are related.

François Mauriac

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

François Mauriac

It seems that, after nineteen centuries of extraordinary glorification, the small Host for which so many cathedrals have sprung up, the small Host that has rested in millions of breasts and that has found a tabernacle and worshippers even in the desert - it seems that the triumphant Host of Lourdes and the Eucharistic Congresses of Chicago and Carthage remains as unknown, as secret as when it appeared for the first time in a room in Jerusalem. Light is in the world as in the days of St. John the Baptist, and the world does not know it.

François Mauriac

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

François Mauriac

The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.

François Mauriac

Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna.

François Mauriac

A good critic is the sorcerer who makes some hidden spring gush forth unexpectedly under our feet.

François Mauriac