Georges Bernanos Quotes

You know, sometimes I imagine what any decent agnostic of average intelligence might say, if by some impossible chance one of those intolerable praters were to let him stand awhile in the pulpit, in his stead: 'Ladies and gentlemen,... I don't share all your beliefs, but I probably know more about the history of the church than you do, because I happen to have read it, and not many parishioners can say that. For though you're not interested in unbelievers, unbelievers are extremely interested in you..Yes, we were drawn to you. But now we've decided that you're not very interesting after all, and it's rather disappointing.....Because you do not live your faith, your faith has ceased to be a living thing.'

I know that the Crusaders of Majorca put to death, in a single night, all the prisoners who were huddled in the Catalonian trenches. They took the whole herd down to the shore and shot them, one beast at a time - they were quite leisurely about it. The Lord High Archbishop of Palma arranged to be represented at the ceremony, by a certain number of his priests. You can picture the scene can't you? 'Come on, father, isn't that one ready?' - 'Just a moment captain, I'm handing him over to you at once.' When the job was finished, the Crusaders piled their cattle in two heaps - those who'd been given absolution and those who hadn't- then sprinkled petrol over them. It is quite likely that this purification by fire may then have taken on, by reason of the presence of priests officiating a liturgical significance. Unfortunately I only saw these blackened, shiny creatures two days after that, contorted by the flames, some of them counterfeiting obscene poses in death, which must have been very distressing for the ladies of Palma and for their eminent confessors. A reeking tar oozed out of them...

You don't wage civil war in kid gloves. The Spanish bishops know it so well that they have been obliged to refer to 'regrettable excesses' and 'inevitable abuses'. They seem to think that war is like Shrove Tuesday, that it's a jolly respite, as it were, from social morality, and that men can give themselves up to being cruel just as gay sparks at carnival-time indulge in bottom-pinching! Once the illuminations go out, we must welcome the dear lad home with a smile that's both knowing and fatherly. 'Don't worry, my dear boy. We can none of us resist a little fun sometimes. Think no more about it.' But, Your Excellencies, this is something more than a little fun!

Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless.

Once or twice, when she [Chantal] had adroitly avoided an opportunity of pleasing or winning admiration (for her shrewd wit and vivacity made her popular), she was astonished at his [Abbé Chevance's] disapproval. [She asked him why.] Blushing he had replied, "I will tell you, my daughter. I used to try very hard to be admired, to be liked. That is the world!" Then, with that profound finesse which no one had ever had the wit to recognize in the former priest of Costerel-sur-Meuse, he at once added, "I had more to fear from the world than you have."

[F]irst of all, be what you are.

Only the present counts.

He [Abbé Cénabre] had often reflected on the plight of even the most illustrious of those renegades who finish up engaged in a monotonous argument they can never quite extricate themselves from and seem to be insulting the God they have offended, dragging Him along with them like a fellow criminal shackled to them.... He thought, not without some justification, that where such tortured and anxious nihilists had made their greatest mistake was in having freed only their intellects, leaving belief to go on surviving and festering in the most hidden and least accessible parts of their sensibility. Such a deep and hidden contradiction is all the more destructive because they cannot form a clear idea of it, or indeed express it, except in terms of stammering, repeated, pointless, and childish expressions of hatred. They no longer have any part in a faith that still holds them in abject and slavering thrall. It matters little that they think they have destroyed it.

For temptation is like the birth of another man inside a man, a horrible extension of himself. He drags this weight in his heart, not daring to cast it from him. For where could he cast it? Into another heart? The saint is always alone, at the foot of the cross. No other friend.

Hatred of the priest is one of man's profoundest instincts, as well as one of the least known. That it is as old as the race itself no one doubts, yet our age has raised it to an almost prodigious degree of refinement and excellence. With the decline or disappearance of other powers, the priest, even though appearing so intimately integrated into the life of society, has become a more singular and unclassifiable being than any of those old magicians the ancient world used to keep locked up like sacred animals in the depths of its temples, existing in the intimacy of the gods alone. Priests moreover are all the more singular and unclassifiable in that they do not recognize themselves as such and are nearly always dupes of the most gross outward appearances — whether of the irony of some or the servile deference of others. But that contradiction, by nature more political than religious and used far too long to nurture clerical pride, does, through the growing feeling of their loneliness and to the extent that it is gradually transformed into hostile indifference, throw them unarmed into the heart of social conflicts they naively pride themselves on being able to resolve by using texts. But, then, what does it matter? The hour is coming when, on the ruins of the old Christian order, a new order will be born that will indeed be an order of the world, the order of the Prince of this World, of that prince whose kingdom is of this world. And the hard law of necessity, stronger than any illusions, will then remove the very object for clerical pride so long maintained simply by conventions outlasting any belief. And the footsteps of beggars shall cause the earth to tremble once again.

I saw a woman of thirty-five, living peacefully in the bosom of her family after an interrupted novitiate, show sudden signs of incomprehensible nervous terror, speak of possible 'reprisals', and refuse to go out alone. A very dear friend, took pity on her, offered her shelter. 'Come, child, what have you to fear? You're one of God's little lambs...' 'Harmless? That's all you know! Everybody thinks as you do, and nobody's frightened of me. Well - you can find out for yourself. I had eight men shot, madame...'

[Chantal to Fiodor:] "It seems to me that evil is much less complicated than you would like to believe. Here or anywhere else there is only one sin."
"What sin?"
"To tempt God," she said. "And what's the use? I think you are really very stupid. God looks where He pleases. If He has not yet looked at you, what is the use of tempting Him?"

[T]here is nothing that God hates so much as a liar.

God knows that we should not despise anything. We must do our best.

[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.