Charles Peguy Quotes

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

We shall never know how many acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of appearing not sufficiently progressive.

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors

He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.

We said that a single injustice, a single crime, a single illegality, particularly if it is officially recorded, confirmed, a single wrong to humanity, a single wrong to justice and to right, particularly if it is universally, legally, nationally, commodiously accepted, that a single crime shatters and is sufficient to shatter the whole social pact, the whole social contract, that a single legal crime, a single dishonorable act will bring about the loss of ones honor, the dishonor of a whole people. It is a touch of gangrene that corrupts the entire body.

We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see.

Freedom is a system based on courage.

Life holds only one tragedy, ultimately: not to have been a saint.

The faith that I love the best, says God, is hope.

It is better to have a war for justice than peace in injustice.

The sinner is at the heart of Christianity. No one is as competent as the sinner in matters of Christianity. No one, except a saint.

Any father whose son raises his hand against him is guilty of having produced a son who raised his hand against him.

Homer is new this morning, and perhaps nothing is as old as today's newspaper.

What is most contrary to salvation is not sin but habit.

When a man dies, he does not just die of the disease he has: he dies of his whole life.

It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas.

I prefer a saint with faults to a sinner with none.

The life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity.

Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

It has never been given to a man to attain at once his happiness and his salvation.

When you love someone you love him as he is.

Love is rarer than genius itself. And friendship is rarer than love.

One has not the right to betray even a traitor. Traitors must be fought, got betrayed.

It is innocence that is full and experience that is empty. It is innocence that wins and experience that loses.

The references you do not verify are the good ones.

The classical artist can be recognized by his sincerity, the romantic by his laborious insincerity.

A great philosophy is not a philosophy without reproach; it is philosophy without fear.

Suffering passes; having suffered never passes.

There will be things that I do that no one will be left to understand.

A great philosophy is not one that passes final judgments and establishes ultimate truth. It is one that causes uneasiness and starts commotion.