Léon Bloy Quotes

You are always on the right side when you are with those who suffer persecution and injustice.

Tu seras invendable à perpétuité, l'Invendable, dans tes livres aussi bien que dans ta personne, et ainsi se réalisera tout à fait la séparation, naturellement désirée par toi, d'avec les vendeurs et les gens à vendre.

My anger is the effervescence of my pity.

A perfectly true thought, expressed in very sound terms, can satisfy the reason without giving any impression of the Beautiful; but in that case certainly there is something false in its statement. It is essential that Truth be in Glory. Splendor of style is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

The rich have a horror of Poverty because they have a dim foreboding of the expiatory interchange implied by her presence.

Any Christian who is not a hero is a pig.

I see from time to time coins that are tinted with red, having been handled by a butcher or a murderer, and the sight of that money makes me wonder. As I think about the probable origin of that sign of wealth, I tell myself that that is indeed its true color, the color which it should, which it must have, the color that was doubtless taken on by Judas’s pieces of silver, after which he ceased to recognize them and returned them at once to the egregious scoundrels who had given them to him. These, not recognizing the pieces themselves, did not want to return to the treasury of the Temple money so strange in its color. Everyone knows they used it to buy the field of blood, a generic name which I imagine can be applied to all bourgeois holdings ever since the Scourging and Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Suffering passes, but the fact of having suffered never passes.

You had hoped that the beloved and noble images flowing from your heart would serve as a river to carry to God many another heart! But, as you see, people are afraid of getting wet.

The worst thing is not to commit crimes but, rather, not to accomplish the good that one could have done. It is the sin of omission, which is nothing other than to be unloving, and no one accuses himself of it.

Ah! The happy ones of this world who are assured their daily bread—that is, all the things necessary to bodily life—and who, not wishing to know Jesus, have never for one single instant had the idea of suffering for their brothers, of sacrificing themselves for the wretched: ah! indeed! such people are assuredly well qualified to judge me and to reproach me for not having what the world calls dignity!

Unhappy writer, you had dreamt of winning souls and you have won nothing but ears!

Woe to him who has not begged!
There is nothing more exalted than to beg.
God begs. The Angels beg. Kings, Prophets, and Saints beg.

There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint.

My secret," he would say to me, "consists in loving with my whole soul, to the point of giving my life for them, the souls called to read me some day.