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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
Failing
Pleasure
Stripped
Anguish
Hypocrisy
Mask
Recognize
Fail

More quotes by 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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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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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
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Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.
Georges Bernanos
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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.
Georges Bernanos
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The modern state no longer has anything but rights it does not recognize duties any more.
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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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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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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[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
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A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.
Georges Bernanos
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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
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What does it matter, all is grace.
Georges Bernanos
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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.
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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Our rages, daughters of despair, creep and squirm like worms. Prayer is the only form of revolt which remains upright.
Georges Bernanos
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The devil, you see, is that friend who never stays with us to the end.
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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[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.
Georges Bernanos
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There is nothing that God hates so much as a liar.
Georges Bernanos