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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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Georges Bernanos
Age: 60 †
Born: 1888
Born: February 20
Died: 1948
Died: July 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Librettist
Novelist
Writer
9th arrondissement
Paris
Bernanos
Flight
Cunning
Pity
Teenage
Hovered
Bird
Tenderness
Watchfulness
Knowing
Sentiments
Surrounds
Around
Irony
Mixture
Young
Surround
Mixtures
Firsts
Birds
Sentiment
First
Hardly
Adolescence

More quotes by Georges Bernanos

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The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.
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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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Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice?
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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?
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You owe it to everyone you love to find pockets of tranquility in your busy world.
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[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.
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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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First of all, be what you are.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.
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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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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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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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?
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