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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 Bernanos

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I Know The Compassion

Georges Bernanos

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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.

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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?

What A Cunning Mixture Of Sentiment, Pity, Tenderness, Irony Surrounds Adolescence, What Knowing Watchfulness! Young Birds On Their First Flight Are Hardly So Hovered Around.

Sadness Came Into The World With Satan - That World Our Saviour Never Prayed For, The World You Say I Do Not Know. Oh, It Is Not So Difficult To Recognize: It Is The World That Prefers Cold To Warmth! What Can God Find To Say To Those Who, Of Their Own Free Will, Of Their Own Weight Incline Towards Sadness And Turn Instinctively Towards The Night?

Justice In The Hands Of The Powerful Is Merely A Governing System Like Any Other. Why Call It Justice? Let Us Rather Call It Injustice, But Of A Sly Effective Order, Based Entirely On Cruel Knowledge Of The Resistance Of The Weak, Their Capacity For Pain, Humilation And Misery. Injustice Sustained At The Exact Degree Of Necessary Tension To Turn The Cogs Of The Huge Machine-for-the-making-of-rich-men, Without Bursting The Boiler.

Hope Is A Risk That Must Be Run.

[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.

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Chantal's Only Ruse ... Was Her Shattering Simplicity. While A Weak Man Or An Imposter Is Always More Complicated Than The Problem He Is Trying To Solve, And Thinking To Encompass His Adversary, Merely Keeps Prowling Interminably Around Himself, The Heroic Nature Will Throw Itself Into The Heart Of The Danger To Turn It To Its Own Use, Just As Captured Artillery Is Turned About And Aimed At The Backs Of The Fleeing Enemy.

Money-crimes Have An Abstract Quality. History Is Laden With The Victims Of Gold, But Their Remains Are Odourless.

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First Of All, Be What You Are.

The Devil, You See, Is That Friend Who Never Stays With Us To The End.

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Le De S Ir De La Prie' Re Est De J A' Une Prie' Re. The Wish For Prayer Is Already A Prayer.

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Appearances Are Nothing.... And First Of All They Should Not Be Feared, They Are Only Dangerous To The Weak.

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The Contradictions In Renan , His Feminine Sensibility, Coquetry, Unavowed Egotism, And Sudden Emotional Outbursts, All Indicate A Soul Deliberately Using Distraction As A Means Of Evasion. The Perpetual Equivocation Bears Witness To God In The Same Way As The Twisting And Turning Of A Hunted Animal Indicates The Presence Of An Unseen Hunter.

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Hell, Madame, Is To Love No Longer.

Friendship Love

[t]he Cradle Is Shallower Than The Grave.

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What Does It Matter, All Is Grace.

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