Francois Mauriac Quotes

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.

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.

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

Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell.

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

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

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

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

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.

Men resemble great deserted palaces: the owner occupies only a few rooms and has closed-off wings where he never ventures.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The temples of those who deny the Real Presence are like corpses. The Lord was taken away and we do not know where they have laid Him.

Being for every man the touchstone of faith and love, the Eucharist, like on the Cross, divided the minds as soon as it was announced... Nothing engages a man as much as does the Eucharist

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

We know well only what we are deprived of.

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.

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

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