Francois Mauriac Quotes

“If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.”

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

“If the flame inside you goes out, the souls that are next to you will die of cold.”

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

“I remained standing in the middle of the room, swaying on my feet as though I had received a blow. I thought of my life and saw what it had been. No one could swim against such a current of mud. I had been a man so horrible that he could have no friend. But wasn't that, I asked myself, because I had always been incapable of wearing a disguise? If all men went through life with unmasked faces, as I had done for half a century, one might be surprised to find how little difference there was between them. But, in fact, no one lives with his face uncovered, no one. Most men ape greatness or nobility. Though they do not know it, they conform to certain fixed types, literary or other. This the saints know, and they hate and despise themselves because they see themselves with unclouded eyes. I should not have been so universally condemned had I not been so defenseless, so open, and so naked.”

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

“The man who partakes in the breaking of the bread dares to build his house on the very core of love. He becomes, as it were, Godlike, but regardless of the strength he derives from it, his free will remains. We are always free to disown this immense grace, to abuse it. The Greatest Love may be betrayed. Fed on the Living Bread, we nevertheless conceal a part of ourselves which longs for swine's food.”

“Human love is often but the encounter of two weaknesses.”

“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.”

“What makes a poet is, surely, the love of these things, a desperate search for the tiny ray of sunshine which used to flicker on the floor of a child’s bedroom.”

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

“Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell.”

“Very little would have been needed for the tears of Judas to be allied in the memory of mankind with those of Peter.”

“Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are" is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread.”

“The effort of explaining, even of expressing himself, had become, with the years, more and more terrifying to him. Whether from laziness or from inability to find the right words, he had developed almost a passion for silence.”

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

“The myth of Prometheus means that all the sorrows of the world have their seat in the liver. But it needs a brave man to face so humble a truth.”

“Most men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed off wings where he never ventures.”

“One can touch a living soul through a curtain of vice and crime no matter how dense and dark: but vulgarity is an insurmountable barrier.”

“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.”

“We know well only what we are deprived of.”

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

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

“I believe that only poetry counts… A great novelist is first of all a great poet.”

“The grandeur of man lies in song, not in thought.”

“Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A man's passion for the mountain is, above all, his childhood which refuses to die.”

“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.”

“There is no accident in our choice of reading. All our sources are related.”

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

“Did you ever have a conversation with someone who misunderstood everything you had to say? It's exhausting, and the ironic part is that the more you try and explain yourself, the more mixed up things become. Your best friend knows when you're kidding, venting, and tired. He or she knows you and therefore doesn't read into the things you say.”

“Doubt is nothing but a trivial agitation on the surface of the soul, while deep down there is a calm certainty.”

“The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.”