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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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Georges Bernanos
Age: 60 †
Born: 1888
Born: February 20
Died: 1948
Died: July 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Librettist
Novelist
Writer
9th arrondissement
Paris
Bernanos
Duties
State
Doe
Recognize
States
Duty
Anything
Longer
Modern
Rights
Literature
Nations

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A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.
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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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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?
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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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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.
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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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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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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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Hell is not to love anymore.
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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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Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice?
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Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it.
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Faith is not a thing which one loses, we merely cease to shape our lives by it.
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What does it matter, all is grace.
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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.
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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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There is nothing that God hates so much as a liar.
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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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Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.
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