Jacques Maritain - Man Quotes

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

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

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