Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Georges Bernanos
Age: 60 †
Born: 1888
Born: February 20
Died: 1948
Died: July 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Librettist
Novelist
Writer
9th arrondissement
Paris
Bernanos
Done
Called
World
Secret
Point
Absurdly
Use
Nausea
Jobs
Demon
Seems
Decent
Firsts
Useless
First
Seem

More quotes by Georges Bernanos

Image
The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.
Georges Bernanos
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Civilization exists precisely so that there may be no masses but rather men alert enough never to constitute masses.
Georges Bernanos
Image
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
Image
All her life she [Chantal] had been carefully, heroically watching over mediocre beings who were hardly real, over things of no value.
Georges Bernanos
Image
Hell, madame, is to love no longer.
Georges Bernanos
Image
[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.
Georges Bernanos
Image
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.
Georges Bernanos
Image
Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.
Georges Bernanos
Image
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.
Georges Bernanos
Image
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
Image
To be able to share in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness.
Georges Bernanos
Image
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
Image
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
Image
God! how is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?
Georges Bernanos
Image
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
Image
Hell is not to love anymore.
Georges Bernanos
Image
Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it.
Georges Bernanos
Image
It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.
Georges Bernanos