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

Jacques Maritain
In each of us there dwells a mystery, and that mystery is the human personality.

Jacques Maritain
Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves.

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
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 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.

Jacques Maritain
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.

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

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

Jacques Maritain
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.

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

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

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

Jacques Maritain
There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world.

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
Few spectacles are as beautiful and moving for the mind as that of physics thus advancing toward its destiny like a huge throbbing ship.

Jacques Maritain
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.

Jacques Maritain
God's love causes the beauty of what He loves, our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.

Jacques Maritain
The light of common sense is fundamentally the same light as that of science, that is to say, the natural light of the intellect. But in common sense this light does not return upon itself by critical reflection, and is not perfected by what we shall learn to know as a scientific habit.

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