What does the truth matter? Haven't we mothers all given our sons a taste for lies, lies which from the cradle upwards lull them, reassure them, send them to sleep: lies as soft and warm as a breast!
Georges BernanosRead
Hell, madame, is to love no longer.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The essence of hell is losing the ability to love.
In this quote, Georges Bernanos highlights the profound emptiness and despair that comes from the absence of love. He posits that the true torment of hell lies not in physical suffering, but in the emotional and spiritual void experienced when one can no longer connect with love, suggesting that love is vital to the human experience.
Themes
LoveHellEmptinessConnectionDespair
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about the importance of emotional connections, one could emphasize that losing the ability to love can lead to a personal hell.
More from Georges Bernanos
All quotes →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 BernanosRead
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 BernanosRead
It's a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.
Georges BernanosRead
God! how is it that we fail to recognize that the mask of pleasure, stripped of all hypocrisy, is that of anguish?
Georges BernanosRead
Have you never been moved by poor men's fidelity, the image of you they form in their simple minds? Why should you always talk of their envy, without understanding that what they ask of you is not so much your worldly goods, as something very hard to define, which they themselves can put no name to; yet at times it consoles their loneliness; a dream of splendor, of magnificence, a tawdry dream, a poor man's dream -and yet God blesses it!
Georges BernanosRead
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They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?
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I desire many things concerning myself; but I desire nothing so much, as to have a heart filled with love to the Lord. I long for a warm personal attachment to Him.
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