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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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Georges Bernanos
Age: 60 †
Born: 1888
Born: February 20
Died: 1948
Died: July 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Librettist
Novelist
Writer
9th arrondissement
Paris
Bernanos
Men
Avoid
Optimist
Seemed
Cunning
Egoists
Question
Misfortunes
Vexed
State
Anxious
Alibi
Order
Cover
Pitying
States
Optimism
Optimists
Self
Pity
Chronic
Always
Satisfaction
Misfortune

More quotes by 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.
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To be able to share in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness.
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There is nothing that God hates so much as a liar.
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The devil, you see, is that friend who never stays with us to the end.
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Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.
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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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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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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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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.
Georges Bernanos
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The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.
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A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.
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The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
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
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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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[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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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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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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God! how is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?
Georges Bernanos
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[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.
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.
Georges Bernanos