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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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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There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world.
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A man of courage flees forward, in the midst of new things.
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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.
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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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Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.
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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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A community of free men cannot exist if its spiritual base is not solely law.
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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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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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The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people.
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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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Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
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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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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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We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities.
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With all his sincerity and devotion, the authentic, absolute atheist is after all only an abortive saint, and at the same time, a mistaken revolutionist.
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What we need is not truths that serve us but a truth we may serve.
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It is enough that things exist for God to be unavoidable. Let us but grant to a bit of moss or the smallest ant its due nature as an ontological reality, and we can no longer escape the terrifying hand that made us.
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Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves.