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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

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The modern state no longer has anything but rights it does not recognize duties any more.
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Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.
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[A] good Christian does not care for miracles very much, because a miracle is God looking after His own affairs, and we prefer looking after them for Him.
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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.
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Hell is not to love anymore.
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It is the perpetual dread of fear, the fear of fear, that shapes the face of a brave man.
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Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.
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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?
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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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The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.
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Hell, madame, is to love no longer.
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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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Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.
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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.
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The devil, you see, is that friend who never stays with us to the end.
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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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God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best.
Georges Bernanos
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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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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.
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Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice?
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