Charles Peguy Quotes

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

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

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

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

Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.

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

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

Freedom is a system based on courage.

Suffering passes; having suffered never passes.

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

Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you love someone you love him as he is.

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

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

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