Jacques Maritain Quotes

48 Sourced Quotes

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.

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
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
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.

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
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
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.

Jacques Maritain
Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it.

Jacques Maritain
What we need is not truths that serve us but a truth we may serve.

Jacques Maritain
There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.

Jacques Maritain
The hope of the coming of a new Christian era in our civilization is to my mind a hope for a distant future, a very distant future.

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
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.

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

Jacques Maritain
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.

Jacques Maritain
In so far as we are individuals, each of us is a fragment of a species, a part of this universe, a single dot in the immense network of forces and influences, cosmic, ethnic, historic, whose laws we obey. We are subject to the determination of the physical world. But each man is also a person, he is not subject to the stars and atoms; for he subsists entirely with the very subsistence of his spiritual soul, and the latter is in him a principle of creative unity, of independence and of freedom.

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

Jacques Maritain