Miles Mitchell

“The expression 'to lose one's faith', as one might a purse or a ring of keys, has always seemed to me rather foolish. It must be one of those sayings of bourgeois piety, a legacy of those wretched priests of the eighteenth century who talked so much.

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it. That is why old-fashioned confessors are not far wrong in showing a certain amount of scepticism when dealing with 'intellectual crises', doubtless far more rare than people imagine. An educated man may come by degrees to tuck away his faith in some back corner of his brain, where he can find it again on reflection, by an effort of memory: yet even if he feels a tender regret for what no longer exists and might have been, the term 'faith' would nevertheless be inapplicable to such an abstraction, no more like real faith, to use a very well-worn simile, than the constellation of Cygne is like a swan.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“As flowerets drooped and puckered in the night
turn up to the returning sun and spread
their petals wide on his new warmth and light-

just so my wilted spirits rose again
and such a heat of zeal surged through my veins that I was born anew.”
― Dante Alighieri

“Our habits are our friends. Even our bad habits.”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

“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...”
― Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest