Francois Mauriac Quotes

Human love is often but the encounter of two weaknesses.

I love Germany so much I'm glad there are two of them.

By the time dusk fell, he was back in his room. The last of the daylight lay like fine ashes on the roof-tops. He did not light his lamp, but sat by the fireplace in the dark, seeking in the far distance of his past some vague memory of a love-affair, some recollection of a friendship, with which to soften the hard tyranny of isolation.

This God who, as the psalmist said, built His tabernacles in the sun, now establishes Himself in the very core of the flesh and the blood.

The arrogance of poets is only a defense; doubt gnaws the greatest among them; they need our testimony to escape despair.

Let us be wary of ready-made ideas about cowardice and courage: the same burden weighs infinitely more heavily on some shoulders than on others.

That is the mystery of grace: it never comes too late.

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

We are, all of us, molded and remolded by those who have loved us, and though that love may pass, we remain none the less their work
a work that very likely they do not recognize, and which is never exactly what they intended.

Tell me what you read and I will tell you who you are.

It never occurs to one to think whether she is pretty or ugly. One just surrenders to her charm.

Observe that for the novelist who has remained Christian, like myself, man is someone creating himself or destroying himself. He is not an immobile being, fixed, cast in a mold once and for all. This is what makes the traditional psychological novel so different from what I did or thought I was doing. The human being as I conceive him in the novel is a being caught up in the drama of human salvation, even if he doesn't know it.

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

I felt at one and the same time quite close, within reach of my hand, and yet an infinite distance away, an unknown world of goodness. Often Isa had said to me: 'You, who see nothing but evil ... You, who see evil everywhere ... ' It was true, and it was not true.

A good critic is the sorcerer who makes some hidden spring gush forth unexpectedly under our feet.

It seems that, after nineteen centuries of extraordinary glorification, the small Host for which so many cathedrals have sprung up, the small Host that has rested in millions of breasts and that has found a tabernacle and worshippers even in the desert - it seems that the triumphant Host of Lourdes and the Eucharistic Congresses of Chicago and Carthage remains as unknown, as secret as when it appeared for the first time in a room in Jerusalem. Light is in the world as in the days of St. John the Baptist, and the world does not know it

The really pure in heart know nothing of what goes on around them each day, each night; never realize what poisonous weeds spring up beneath their childish feet.

The sin against nature [is] - compulsory celibacy

What an odd creature you are, Bernard, with your constant fear of death! Do you never have a feeling, as I do, of utter futility? No? Doesn't it occur to you that the sort of life people like us lead is remarkably like death?

She was surprised to find that something from deep down in herself welled into her eyes and burned her cheeks: a few poor tears shed by one who never cried!

Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell.

God does not answer our desperate questionings; he simply gives us himself.

Death was not a person ... with a devil one could talk, with the worst of monsters one could reach some sort of understanding, make some kind of bargain ... Death was horrible just because it was nothing, because it had no existence, because it smothered all it touched, turned everything to emptiness.

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.

No man can bear a child's cross.

What a fool she was ever to have imagined that there might be some place in the world where she could sink to the earth with the knowledge that there were people round her who understood, who perhaps even admired and loved her! She was fated to carry loneliness about with her as a leper carries his scabs. 'No one can do anything for me: no one can do anything against me.

No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.

I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.