Charles Péguy Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

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

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

Charles Péguy
The life of the honest man must be an apostasy and a perpetual desertion. The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself continually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors. And the man who wishes to remain faithful to justice must make himself continually unfaithful to inexhaustibly triumphant injustices.

Charles Péguy
Work for them was joy itself and the deep root of their being. And the reason of their being. There was an incredible honor in work, the most beautiful of all the honors. … We have known this devotion to l'ouvrage bien faite, to the good job, carried and maintained to its most exacting claims. … Today, what remains of all this? How has … the only people that loved to work … been transformed into one which in the workyard takes the greatest pains not to lift a hand?

Charles Péguy
Towards this fine honor of a trade converged all the finest, all the most noble sentiments—dignity, pride. Never ask anything of anyone, they used to say. … In those days a workman did not know what it was to solicit. It is the bourgeoisie who, turning the workmen into bourgeois, have taught them to solicit.

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

Charles Péguy
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.

Charles Péguy
In my servant the ant, my tiny servant, who hoards greedily like a miser.
Who works like one unhappy and who has no break and who has no rest.

Charles Péguy
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.

Charles Péguy
It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.

Charles Péguy
It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have too many.

Charles Péguy
I am so resplendent in my creation.
That in order really not to see me these poor people would have to be blind.

Charles Péguy
Faith is a loyal Wife.
Charity is a Mother.
An ardent mother, noble-hearted.
Or an older sister who is like a mother.
Hope is a little girl, nothing at all.

Charles Péguy
Surrender is essentially an operation by means of which we set about explaining instead of acting.

Charles Péguy
The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity. Nobody is so competent as the sinner in matters of Christianity. Nobody, except the saint.

Charles Péguy
Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

Charles Péguy