"What does the truth matter? Haven't we mothers all given our sons a taste for lies, lies which from the cradle upwards lull them, reassure them, send them to sleep: lies as soft and warm as a breast!"
About this Quote
Truth gets shoved offstage here not by politicians or propagandists, but by the first and most intimate institution a person ever joins: the mother-child bond. Bernanos loads the line with sacrilege and tenderness at once. The provocation is the opening sneer - "What does the truth matter?" - a question that sounds like cynicism but functions more like an accusation. He is not admiring lies; he is indicting the comfort we demand from them.
The subtext is brutal: our appetite for illusion is learned as love. By framing lies as something "from the cradle upwards" that "lull", "reassure", and "send them to sleep", he links deception to care, not malice. The image does the heavy lifting. "Soft and warm as a breast" is deliberately unsettling: the very source of nourishment becomes the metaphor for falsehood. Bernanos is suggesting that the first lies are not cover-ups but consolations, stories we tell children so they can survive fear, uncertainty, and the raw fact of mortality. Then those consolations harden into a lifelong preference for soothing narratives over difficult realities.
Context matters. Bernanos, a Catholic novelist and moralist writing in a Europe chewed up by war, mass politics, and spiritual fatigue, distrusted any culture that chose comfort over conscience. Read against the 20th century's machinery of persuasion, the line lands as a warning: a society doesn't need to teach citizens to lie if it teaches them to crave being lied to. The sting is that he locates the origin of that craving in the place we least want to suspect.
The subtext is brutal: our appetite for illusion is learned as love. By framing lies as something "from the cradle upwards" that "lull", "reassure", and "send them to sleep", he links deception to care, not malice. The image does the heavy lifting. "Soft and warm as a breast" is deliberately unsettling: the very source of nourishment becomes the metaphor for falsehood. Bernanos is suggesting that the first lies are not cover-ups but consolations, stories we tell children so they can survive fear, uncertainty, and the raw fact of mortality. Then those consolations harden into a lifelong preference for soothing narratives over difficult realities.
Context matters. Bernanos, a Catholic novelist and moralist writing in a Europe chewed up by war, mass politics, and spiritual fatigue, distrusted any culture that chose comfort over conscience. Read against the 20th century's machinery of persuasion, the line lands as a warning: a society doesn't need to teach citizens to lie if it teaches them to crave being lied to. The sting is that he locates the origin of that craving in the place we least want to suspect.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
|---|
More Quotes by Georges
Add to List
