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

Georges Bernanos

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Georges Bernanos
Age: 60 †
Born: 1888
Born: February 20
Died: 1948
Died: July 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Librettist
Novelist
Writer
9th arrondissement
Paris
Bernanos
Face
Faces
Fear
Men
Bravery
Dread
Perpetual
Brave
Shapes

More quotes by Georges Bernanos

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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
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You owe it to everyone you love to find pockets of tranquility in your busy world.
Georges Bernanos
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To be able to share in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness.
Georges Bernanos
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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
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First of all, be what you are.
Georges Bernanos
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Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.
Georges Bernanos
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All her life she [Chantal] had been carefully, heroically watching over mediocre beings who were hardly real, over things of no value.
Georges Bernanos
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Hell, madame, is to love no longer.
Georges Bernanos
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.
Georges Bernanos
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Sadness came into the world with Satan - that world our Saviour never prayed for, the world you say I do not know. Oh, it is not so difficult to recognize: it is the world that prefers cold to warmth! What can God find to say to those who, of their own free will, of their own weight incline towards sadness and turn instinctively towards the night?
Georges Bernanos
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Faith is not a thing which one loses, we merely cease to shape our lives by it.
Georges Bernanos
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Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice?
Georges Bernanos
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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
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Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.
Georges Bernanos
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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
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Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.
Georges Bernanos