The Diary of a Country Priest Quotes

“The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.”
― George Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“God! how is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“But I shall give less thought to the future, I shall work in the present. I feel such work is within my power. For I only succeed in small things, and when I am tried by anxiety, I am bound to say it is the small joys that release me.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“It is one of the most mysterious penalties of men that they should be forced to confide the most precious of their possessions to things so unstable and ever changing, alas, as words.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears...”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“A Christian people doesn't mean a lot of goody-goodies. The Church has plenty of stamina, and isn't afraid of sin. On the contrary, she can look it in the face calmly and even take it upon herself, assume it at times, as Our Lord did. When a good workman's been at it for a whole week, surely he's due for a booze on Saturday night. Look: I'll define you a Christian people by the opposite. The opposite of a Christian people is a people grown sad and old. You'll be saying that isn't a very theological definition. I agree...

Why does our earliest childhood always seem so soft and full of light? A kid's got plenty of troubles, like everybody else, and he's really so very helpless, quite unarmed against pain and illness. Childhood and old age should be the two greatest trials of mankind. But that very sense of powerlessness is the mainspring of a child's joy. He just leaves it all to his mother, you see. Present, past, future -- his whole life is caught up in one look, and that look is a smile. Well, lad, if only they'd let us have our way, the Church might have given men that supreme comfort. Of course they'd each have their own worries to grapple with, just the same. Hunger, thirst, poverty, jealousy -- we'd never be able to pocket the devil once and for all, you may be sure. But man would have known he was the son of God; and therein lies your miracle. He'd have lived, he'd have died with that idea in his noddle -- and not just a notion picked up in books either -- oh, no! Because we'd have made that idea the basis of everything: habits and customs, relaxation and pleasure, down to the very simplest needs. That wouldn't have stopped the labourer ploughing, or the scientist swotting at his logarithms, or even the engineer making his playthings for grown-up people. What we would have got rid of, what we would have torn from the very heart of Adam, is that sense of his own loneliness...

God has entrusted the Church to keep [the soul of childhood] alive, to safeguard our candour and freshness... Joy is the gift of the Church, whatever joy is possible for this sad world to share... What would it profit you even to create life itself, when you have lost all sense of what life really is?”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“Our habits are our friends. Even our bad habits.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“Void fascinates those who daren't look into it. They throw themselves in, for fear of falling.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“I have no ambition to change my nature, I merely intend to conquer my dislikes.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“Je crois, je suis sûr que beaucoup d’hommes n’engagent jamais leur être, leur sincérité profonde. Ils vivent à la surface d’eux-mêmes, et le sol humain est si riche que cette mince couche superficielle suffit pour une maigre moisson, qui donne l’illusion d’une véritable destinée.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“The expression 'to lose one's faith', as one might a purse or a ring of keys, has always seemed to me rather foolish. It must be one of those sayings of bourgeois piety, a legacy of those wretched priests of the eighteenth century who talked so much.

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it. That is why old-fashioned confessors are not far wrong in showing a certain amount of scepticism when dealing with 'intellectual crises', doubtless far more rare than people imagine. An educated man may come by degrees to tuck away his faith in some back corner of his brain, where he can find it again on reflection, by an effort of memory: yet even if he feels a tender regret for what no longer exists and might have been, the term 'faith' would nevertheless be inapplicable to such an abstraction, no more like real faith, to use a very well-worn simile, than the constellation of Cygne is like a swan.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather, at the very source of its life! To confound this lust in man with that desire which unites the sexes is like confusing a tumor with the very organ which it devours, a tumor whose very deformity horribly reproduces the shape.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“For those who have the habit of prayer, thought is too often a mere alibi, a sly way of deciding to do what one wants to do. Reason will always obscure what we wish to keep in the shadows. A worldling can think out the pros and cons and sum up his chances. No doubt. But what are our chances worth? We who have admitted once and for all into each moment of our puny lives the terrifying presence of God?...What is the use of working out chances? There are no chances against God.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“Qu'est-ce que cela fait? Tout est grâce.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“I believe, in fact I am certain, that many men never give out the whole of themselves, their deepest truth. They live on the surface, and yet, so rich is the soil of humanity that even this thin outer layer is able to yield a kind of meager harvest which gives the illusion of real living.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort. If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with his shadow, or even less—a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people find until their dying day, I won't even say such great 'comfort'—since they put no faith in the solace of the senses—but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer? Oh, of course—suggestion, say the scientists. Certainly they can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgement, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!

This seems a very daring comparison. I apologise for having advanced it, yet perhaps it might satisfy many people who find it hard to think for themselves, unless the thought has first been jolted by some unexpected, surprising image. Could a sane man set himself up as a judge of music because he has sometimes touched a keyboard with the tips of his fingers? And surely if a Bach fugue, a Beethoven symphony leave him cold, if he has to content himself with watching on the face of another listener the reflected pleasure of supreme, inaccessible delight, such a man has only himself to blame.

But alas! We take the psychiatrists' word for it. The unanimous testimony of saints is held as of little or no account. They may all affirm that this kind of deepening of the spirit is unlike any other experience, that instead of showing us more and more of our own complexity it ends in sudden total illumination, opening out upon azure light—they can be dismissed with a few shrugs. Yet when has any man of prayer told us that prayer had failed him?”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“We pay a heavy, very heavy price for the superhuman dignity of our calling. The ridiculous is always so near to the sublime. And the world, usually so indulgent to foibles, hates ours instinctively.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“Well, as I was saying, the world is eaten up by boredom. To perceive this needs a little preliminary thought: you can’t see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is sifted so fine, it doesn’t even grit on your teeth. But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be forever on the go. And so, people are always “on the go.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“O miracle—thus to be able to give [peace] we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands!”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“Those who still profess the rule of hope, teach optimism only by force of habit, without believing in what they say.”
― Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest

“My parish is bored stiff; no other word for it.  Like so many others! We can see them being eaten up by boredom, and we can’t do anything about it.  Someday perhaps we shall catch it ourselves—become aware of the cancerous growth within us.  You can keep going a long time with that in you.”
― Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest

“Oh! Je sais bien que la compassion d'autrui soulage un moment, je ne la méprise point. Mais elle ne désalèere pas, elle s'écoule dans l'âme comme a travers un crible. Et quand notre souffrance passe de pitié en pitié, ainsi que de bouche en bouche, il me semble que nous ne pouvons plus la respecter, ni l'aimer...”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“Even from the Cross, when Our Lord in His agony found the perfection of His Sacred Humanity—even then He did not own Himself a victim of injustice: They know not what they do.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“But what would it profit you even to create life itself, when you have lost all sense of what life really is? Might as well blow your brains out among your test-tubes. Manufacture ‘life’ as much as you like, I say! It’s the vision you give us of death that poisons the thoughts of poor devils, bit by bit, that gradually clouds and dulls their last happiness. You’ll be able to keep it up so long as your industries and capital permit you to turn the world into a fair ground of mechanical roundabouts, twirling madly in a perpetual din of brass and crackling fireworks. But just you wait. Wait for the first quarter-of-an-hour’s silence. Then the Word will be heard of men—not the voice they rejected, which spoke so quietly: ‘I am the Way, the Resurrection and the Life,’ but the voice from the depths: ‘I am the door forever locked, the road which leads nowhere, the lie, the everlasting dark’.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“The shabbiest tuppeny doll will rejoice a baby’s heart for half the year, but your mature gentleman will go yawning his head off at a five-hundred-franc gadget. And why? Because he has lost the soul of childhood.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“Nowadays the seminaries turn out little choirboys, little ragamuffins who think they’re working harder than anybody because they never get anything done.”
― Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest

“When writing of oneself one should show no mercy.  Yet why at the first attempt to discover one’s own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears...”
― Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest

“It is like dust.  You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it.  It is sifted so fine, it doesn’t even grit on your teeth.  But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands.  To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be forever on the go.  And so people are always ‘on the go’.”
― Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest

“Mine is a parish like all the rest.  They’re all alike.  Those of to-day I mean.  I was saying so only yesterday to M. le Curé de Norenfontes—that good and evil are probably evenly distributed, but on such a low plane, very low Indeed! Or if you like they lie one over the other; like oil and water they never mix.  M. le Curé only laughed at me.”
― Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest