François Mauriac > Quotes

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

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

“ ‘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.”
― François Mauriac

“To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others.”
― François Mauriac

“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.”
― François Mauriac, Thérèse

“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.”
― François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux

“We are, all of us, molded and re-molded by those who have loved us, and though that love may pass, we remain nonetheless their work—a work that very likely they do not recognize, and which is never exactly what they intended.”
― François Mauriac, The Desert of Love

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

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

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

“I've always had a passion for tearing the bandages from other people's eyes. I've always insisted that those round me should see things as they are. I suppose it is that I need companionship in despair. I can't understand not despairing.”
― François Mauriac, Thérèse

“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.”
― François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux

“The human creature, humiliated and offended in ways that are inconceivable to the mind and heart, defies the blind and deaf divinity.”
― Françoise Mauriac

“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!”
― François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux

“Even the genuinely good cannot, unaided, learn to love. To penetrate beyond the absurdities, the vices, and, above all, the stupidities of human creatures, one must possess the secret of a love which the world has now forgotten. Until that secret shall have been discovered, all betterment in conditions of life will be in vain”
― François Mauriac, Vipers' Tangle

“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?”
― François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux

“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.”
― François Mauriac

“La muerte no nos roba los seres amados. Al contrario, nos los guarda y nos los inmortaliza en el recuerdo. La vida sí que nos los roba muchas veces y definitivamente.”
― François Mauriac

“Du moins, sur ce trottoir où je t'abandonne,j'ai l'espérance que tu n'es pas seule.”
― François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux

“How strange it is that when life is just beginning for us, and when a little happiness comes our way, no warning voice is heard.”
― François Mauriac, Vipers' Tangle

“The Ladies of the Sacred Heart hung a thousand veils between their little charges and reality. Thérèse despised them for confounding virtue with ignorance.”
― François Mauriac, Thérèse Desqueyroux

“Most men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed off wings where he never ventures.”
― François Mauriac, Journal 1932-1939 (Littérature)

“The sin against nature [is] - compulsory celibacy”
― François Mauriac, Maltaverne: Un adolescent d'autrefois

“Je connais mon coeur, ce coeur, ce nœud de vipères: etoufflé sous elles, saturé de leur venin, il continue de battre au-dessous de ce grouillement. Ce nœud de vipères qu'il est impossible de dénouer, qu'il faudrait trancher d'un coup de couteau, d'un coup de glaive: "Je ne suis pas venu apporter la paix mais le glaive”
― Mauriac, François

“She [Thérèse] believed that the sublime splendour of ordinary existence was hidden from those who lived embedded in it, that for them the bread of every day must lose its savour. Only hearts like hers, fated to bear an infinite frustration, could feed on its intolerable absence.”
― François Mauriac, Thérèse

“Il giorno in cui voi non brucerete più d'amore, molti altri moriranno di freddo.”
― François Mauriac

“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.”
― François Mauriac, Vipers' Tangle

“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.”
― François Mauriac, Vipers' Tangle

“He adored force and hated weakness. It is the crime of female natures.”
― Mauriac François

“Dime lo que lees y te diré quién eres, eso es verdad, pero te conoceré mejor si me dices lo que relees.”
― François Mauriac