Quotes by "Georges Bernanos"

Fear, true fear, is a savage frenzy. Of all the insanities of which we are capable, it is surely the most cruel.

A thought which does not result in an action is nothing much, and an action which does not proceed from a thought is nothing at all.

Hope is a risk that must be run.

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

Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.

And now she was thinking of her own death, with her heart gripped not by fear but by the excitement of a great discovery, the feeling that she was about to learn what she had been unable to learn from her brief experience of love. What she thought about death was childish, but what could never have touched her in the past now filled her with poignant tenderness, as sometimes a familiar face we see suddenly with the eyes of love makes us aware that it has been dearer to us than life itself for longer than we have ever realized.

It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man.

Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it.

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!

Hell, madam, is to love no longer.

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