Jacques Maritain Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

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.

Jacques Maritain
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.

Jacques Maritain
Nothing is more vain than to seek to unite men by a philosophic minimum.

Jacques Maritain
To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being.

Jacques Maritain
The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.

Jacques Maritain
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.

Jacques Maritain
The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies.

Jacques Maritain
The truth of practical intellect is understood not as conformity to an extramental being but as conformity to a right desire; the end is no longer to know what is, but to bring into existence that which is not yet.

Jacques Maritain
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.

Jacques Maritain
To redeem creation the saint wages war on the entire fabric of creation, with the bare weapons of truth and love.

Jacques Maritain
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.

Jacques Maritain
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.

Jacques Maritain
God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

Jacques Maritain
The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.

Jacques Maritain
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.

Jacques Maritain
Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.

Jacques Maritain
The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence — even mental.

Jacques Maritain
In loving things and the being in them man should rather draw things up to the human level than reduce humanity to their measure.

Jacques Maritain
A community of free men cannot exist if its spiritual base is not solely law.

Jacques Maritain
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.

Jacques Maritain
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.

Jacques Maritain
A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.

Jacques Maritain
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.

Jacques Maritain
It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist.

Jacques Maritain
The supernatural light of the spirit is the only night from which the spirit can emerge alive.

Jacques Maritain