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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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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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Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.
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The modern state no longer has anything but rights it does not recognize duties any more.
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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.
Georges Bernanos
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I have just discovered something I have always known: we can no more escape from one another than we can escape from God.
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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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The devil, you see, is that friend who never stays with us to the end.
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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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Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.
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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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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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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 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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Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice?
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.
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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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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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[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.
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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