Jacques Maritain Quotes
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Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.
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Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment. Here we have the first internal inconsistency of contemporary atheism: it proclaims that all religion must necessarily vanish away, and it is itself a religious phenomena.
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Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
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The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.
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Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.
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It is not possible to escape from the results of the irruption of faith into the structures of our knowledge.
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To philosophize man must put his whole soul into play, in much the same manner that to run he must use his heart and lungs.
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A community of free men cannot exist if its spiritual base is not solely law.
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Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
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When one's function is to teach the loftiest wisdom, it is difficult to resist the temptation to believe that until you have spoken, nothing has been said.
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We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities.
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A man of courage flees forward, in the midst of new things.
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Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it.
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For to love is to give what one is, his very being, in the most absolute, the most brazenly metaphysical, the least phenomenalizable sense of this word.
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It has never been recommended to confuse 'loving' with 'seeking to please'… ...Salome pleased Herod's guests; I can hardly believe she was burning with love for them. As for poor John the Baptist... ...she certainly did not envelop him in her love.
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The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people.
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The day when efficacy would prevail over truth will never come for the Church, for then the gates of hell would have prevailed against her.
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There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.
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If it is correct to say that there will always be rightist temperaments and leftist temperaments, it is nevertheless also correct to say that political philosophy is neither rightist nor leftist; it must simply be true.
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Whereas the intelligence of God is both the cause and the measure of the truth of things, things are both the cause and the measure of the truth of our intelligence.
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Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves.
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There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world.
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What we need is not truths that serve us but a truth we may serve.
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Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious.