"We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see"
About this Quote
The repetition is the point. “See” shifts from passive reception to active discipline. Peguy, writing in a France roiled by the Dreyfus Affair, anticlerical politics, and a rising machinery of mass persuasion, understood how public life trains people to look without noticing: to substitute slogans for perception, to treat inconvenient facts as optical illusions. His Catholic-socialist trajectory also matters here: a thinker suspicious of both bourgeois complacency and revolutionary certainty, he targets the shared temptation to replace the world with a ready-made story about the world.
The subtext is a warning about self-deception masquerading as principle. To “see what we see” is not just to gather data; it’s to admit what our eyes have already recorded even when it destabilizes our identity. The quote works because it relocates courage from the mouth to the gaze: before you can be truthful, you have to be unfooled.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite | Cite this Quote |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Peguy, Charles. (n.d.). We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-must-always-tell-what-we-see-above-all-and-2827/
Chicago Style
Peguy, Charles. "We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see." FixQuotes. Accessed February 2, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-must-always-tell-what-we-see-above-all-and-2827/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-must-always-tell-what-we-see-above-all-and-2827/. Accessed 2 Feb. 2026.
