J Maritain Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — 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

Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious. — Jacques Maritain

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. — Jacques Maritain

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

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

A man of courage flees forward, in the midst of new things. — Jacques Maritain

We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve — Jacques Maritain

Let us not go faster than God. It is our emptiness and our thirst that He needs, not our plentitude. — 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

Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence. — Jacques Maritain

It has never been recommended to confuse "loving" with "seeking to please" ... Salome pleased Herod's guests; I can hardly believe she was burning with love for them. As for poor John the Baptist ... she certainly did not envelop him in her love. — Jacques Maritain

The tragedy of modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in effecting democracy. — 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

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. — 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 definition of Christian art is to be found in its subject and its spirit. Everything, sacred and profane, belongs to it. God does not ask for "religious" art or "Catholic" art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth. — 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

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

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences. — 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

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

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

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

If at the present day it has found a warm welcome among certain circles in Europe, it is because all those who hope to derive from humanitarianism a moral code of human kindness for the acceptance of an atheistic society are already implicitly Buddhists. — Jacques Maritain

If books were judged by the bad uses man can put them to, what book has been more misused than the Bible? — Jacques Maritain

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

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. — Jacques Maritain

We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities. — Jacques Maritain