34 Quotes by Gabriel Chevallier

The Curé Noive had a sister who acted as his housekeeper, a lady with a moustache, whose piety was astringent, and who fostered a splenetic God in a heart which was outraged at anything gracious, tender, or lovable that life might offer. There are such cross-grained natures, made spiteful and furious by anything that looks like happiness.

Victorious troops are those who kill more, and here we were the victims. This put the finishing touch to our demoralisation. The soldiers had lost conviction long ago. Now they lost confidence.

If there was one last place in which it was possible to escape the riff-raff of humanity, it was Heaven.

The Church should adapt itself to the manners of the time, since it seems only too clear that the manners of the time adapt themselves less and less to the Church.

Men were snoring, twitching and whimpering, struggling with nightmares less terrible than reality.

The Clochemerle 1929 was a magnificent wine. Drinking it in small sips, his grace the Archbishop felt himself well disposed towards the Clochemerlins. It takes all sorts to make a world and a Church, to people Heaven and Hell. But there was no denying that it took capable vignerons to make a wine like this, men whose minds must on no account be distracted by excessive metaphysical cares.

There is something relentless about the serenity of nature which has a crushing effect on the human mind. The lavish splendour of her phases, which completely ignores human strife, fills the race of men with the sensation of their own ephemeral insignificance and drives them mad.

There is nothing in human affairs that is a true subject for ridicule. Beneath comedy lies the ferment of tragedy; the farcical is but a cloak for coming catastrophe.

As everyone knows, people revert to virtuous ways when they are too old for their virtue to be endangered. The confessor was not deceived by any of these women who repented out of impotence or malice and were inclined to criticize in others the very aberrations of which they themselves had formerly been guilty.