Top 74 Quotes & Sayings by Jacques Maritain
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French philosopher Jacques Maritain.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
I don't see America as a mainland, but as a sea, a big ocean. Sometimes a storm arises, a formidable current develops, and it seems it will engulf everything. Wait a moment, another current will appear and bring the first one to naught.
Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.
A man of courage flees forward, in the midst of new things.
Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious.
The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people.
We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities.
A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.
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.
In point of fact, Western philosophy has never set itself free of Christianity: wherever Christianity did not have a hand in the construction of modern philosophy it served instead as a stumbling block.
Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.
The tragedy of the modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in realizing democracy.
There is no place in the world but contains some trace of God.
The division between the useful arts and the fine arts must not be understood in too absolute a manner. In the humblest work of the craftsmen, if art is there, there is a concern for beauty, through a kind of indirect repercussion that the requirements of the creativity of the spirit exercise upon the production of an object to serve human needs.
We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve
Authority and power are two different things: power is the force by means of which you can oblige others to obey you. Authority is the right to direct and command, to be listened to or obeyed by others. Authority requests power. Power without authority is tyranny.
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 equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies.
The love of Americans for their country is not an indulgent, it is an exacting and chastising love; they cannot tolerate its defects.
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.
God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth
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.
Thus society is born, as something required by nature, and (because this nature is human nature) as something accomplished through a work of reason and will, and freely consented to. Man is a political animal, which means that the human person craves political life, communal life, not only with regard to the family community, but with regard to the civil community.
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.
The spiritual experience of the philosopher is the nourishing soil of philosophy; that without it there is no philosophy; and that, even so, spiritual experience does not, or must not, enter into the intelligible texture of philosophy. The pulp of the fruit must consist of nothing but the truth.
It is necessary that the object that the artist is shaping, whether it be a vase of clay or a fishing boat, be significant of something other than itself. This object must be a sign as well as an object; a meaning must animate it, and make it say more than it is.
Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.
It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist.
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 .
Every work of art reaches man in his inner powers. It reaches him more profoundly and insidiously than any rational proposition, either cogent demonstration or sophistry. For it strikes him with two terrible weapons, Intuition and Beauty, and at the single root in him of all his energies... Art and Poetry awaken the dreams of man, and his longings, and reveal to him some of the abysses he has in himself.
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.
Let us not go faster than God. It is our emptiness and our thirst that He needs, not our plentitude.
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.
Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it.
There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.
God's love causes the beauty of what He loves, our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.
Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil, the civilized heritage of a consistent and integrated system of beliefs and values; its normal horizon , the infinity of human experience enlighted by the passionate insight of anguish or the intellectual virtues of a contemplative mind.
The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence -- even mental.
Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment.
To redeem creation the saint wages war on the entire fabric of creation, with the bare weapons of truth and love.
A man of courage flees forward in the midst of new things.
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.
Art and poetry cannot do without one another. Yet the two words are far from being synonymous. By Art I mean the creative or producing, work-making activity of the human mind. By Poetry I mean, not the particular art which consists in writing verses, but a process both more general and more primary: that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination (as was realized in ancient times; the Latin vates was both a poet and a diviner). Poetry, in this sense, is the secret life of each and all of the arts.
The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.
The aim of education is to guide young persons in the process
through which they shape themselves as human persons-armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, and moral virtues-while at the same time conveying to them the spiritual heritage of the nation and the civilization in which they are involved.
Some truths are seen better through tears.
Nothing is more human than for man to desire naturally things impossible to his nature. It is, indeed, the property of a nature which is not closed up in matter like the nature of physical things, but which is intellectual or infinitized by the spirit. It is the property of a metaphysical nature. Such desires reach for the infinite, because the intellect thirsts for being and being is infinite.
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.
Power without authority is tyranny.
Poetic experience is distinct in nature from mystical experience. Because poetry emanates from the free creativity of the spirit,it is from the very start oriented toward expression, and terminates in a word proffered, it wants to speak; whereas mystical because it emanates from the deepest longing of the spirit bent on knowing, tends of itself toward silence and internal fruition. Poetic experience is busy with the created world and the enigmatic and innumerable relations of existents with one another, not with the Principle of Being.
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.
To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being.
Nothing is more vain than to seek to unite men by a philosophic minimum.
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.
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. 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 phenomenon.
In each of us there dwells a mystery, and that mystery is the human personality.
There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world.
Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so dam serious.
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