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God! how is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?

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
Anguish
Hypocrisy
Mask
Recognize
Fail
Failing
Pleasure
Stripped

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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.
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The devil, you see, is that friend who never stays with us to the end.
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[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.
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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.
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I have done no passably decent job in this world which did not at first seem to me useless - absurdly useless, useless to the point of nausea. My secret demon is called:: What's the use?
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You owe it to everyone you love to find pockets of tranquility in your busy world.
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God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best.
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Hell is not to love anymore.
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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.
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Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it.
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[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.
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Fear, true fear, is a savage frenzy. Of all the insanities of which we are capable, it is surely the cruelest. There is naught to equal its drive, and naught can survive its thrust.
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Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it.
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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.
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Faith is not a thing which one loses, we merely cease to shape our lives by it.
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There is nothing that God hates so much as a liar.
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Appearances are nothing.... And first of all they should not be feared, they are only dangerous to the weak.
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The modern state no longer has anything but rights it does not recognize duties any more.
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What does it matter, all is grace.
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Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.
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