François Mauriac: Citations en anglais (Page 2)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”