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Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.

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
Better
Impurity
Nostalgia
Obsession
Purity
Rather
Fear

More quotes by Georges Bernanos

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[T]he cradle is shallower than the grave.
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Truth is meant to save you first, and the comfort comes afterwards.
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The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.
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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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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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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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Hell, madame, is to love no longer.
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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 devil, you see, is that friend who never stays with us to the end.
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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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Who are you to condemn another's sin? He who condemns sin becomes part of it, espouses it.
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
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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
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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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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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[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.
Georges Bernanos
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What does it matter, all is grace.
Georges Bernanos
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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.
Georges Bernanos
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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.
Georges Bernanos
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To be able to share in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness.
Georges Bernanos