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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
Pity
Teenage
Hovered
Bird
Tenderness
Watchfulness
Knowing
Sentiments
Surrounds
Around
Irony
Mixture
Young
Surround
Mixtures
Firsts
Birds
Sentiment
First
Hardly
Adolescence
Flight
Cunning

More quotes by Georges Bernanos

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The modern state no longer has anything but rights it does not recognize duties any more.
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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.
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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.
Georges Bernanos
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Hell is not to love anymore.
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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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It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.
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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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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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God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best.
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Hell, madame, is to love no longer.
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Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.
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The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
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[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.
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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First of all, be what you are.
Georges Bernanos
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The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.
Georges Bernanos
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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.
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.
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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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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