Jacques Maritain Quotes
Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so dam serious.
God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth
Let us not go faster than God. It is our emptiness and our thirst that He needs, not our plentitude.
Everywhere in the world the industrial regime tends to make the unorganized or unorganizable individual, the pauper, into the victim of a kind of human sacrifice offered to the gods of civilization.
The tragedy of the modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in realizing democracy.
The first step to be taken by everyone who wishes to act morally is to decide not to act according to the general customs and doings of his fellow-men.
Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it.
There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world.
Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.
To redeem creation the saint wages war on the entire fabric of creation, with the bare weapons of truth and love.
God's love causes the beauty of what He loves, our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.
The only artist who does not deserve respect is the one who works to please the public, for commercial success or for official success.
Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment.
There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.
The more the poet grows, the deeper the level of creative intuition descends into the density of his soul. Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing now, he must dig deeper.
The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.
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.
A true Christian is a man who never for a moment forgets what God has done for him in Christ and whose whole comportment and whose activity have their root in the sentiment of gratitude.
The love of Americans for their country is not an indulgent, it is an exacting and chastising love; they cannot tolerate its defects.
What makes man most unhappy is to be deprived not of that which he had, but of that which he did not have, and did not really know.
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.
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.
The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people.
The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies.
There is no question that the language of "felt thought" must be quarried from our personal depths. Like the best gold, it does not lie on the surface.
The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence -- even mental.
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.
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.
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
There are absolute atheists ... Absolute atheism is in no way a mere absence of belief in God. It is rather a refusal of God, a fight against God, a challenge to God.
At each epoch of history the world was in a hopeless state, and at each epoch of history the world muddled through; at each epoch the world was lost, and at each epoch it was saved.
In loving things and the being in them man should rather draw things up to the human level than reduce humanity to their measure.
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.
A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.
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.
