Jacques Maritain Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Art is a creative effort of which the wellsprings lie in the spirit, and which brings us at once the most intimate self of the artist and the secret concurrences which he has perceived in things by means of a vision or intuition all his own, and not to be expressed in ideas and in words-expressible only in the work of art.

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

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

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.

In periods when shallow speculation is rife, one might think that metaphysics would shine forth, at least, by the brilliance of its modest reserve. But the very age that is unaware of the majesty of metaphysics, likewise overlooks its poverty. Its majesty? It is wisdom. Its poverty? It is human science.

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 .

The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The love of Americans for their country is not an indulgent, it is an exacting and chastising love; they cannot tolerate its defects.

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

The aim of education is to guide young persons in the process
through which they shape themselves as human persons-armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, and moral virtues-while at the same time conveying to them the spiritual heritage of the nation and the civilization in which they are involved.

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.

At each epoch of history the world was in a hopeless state, and at each epoch of history the world muddled through; at each epoch the world was lost, and at each epoch it was saved.

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.

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.

Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.

In answer to our question then, 'What is man?' we may give the Greek, Jewish, and Christian idea of man: man as an animal endowed with reason, whose supreme dignity is in the intellect; and man as a free individual in personal relation with God, whose supreme righteousness consists in voluntarily obeying the law of God; and man as a sinful and wounded creature called to divine life and to the freedom of grace, whose supreme perfection consists of love. . . . A person possesses absolute dignity because he is in direct relationship with the realm of being, truth, goodness, and beauty, and with God, and it is only with these that he can arrive at his complete fulfillment. His spiritual fatherland consists of the entire order of things which have absolute value, and which reflect, in some manner, a divine Absolute superior to the world and which have a power of attraction toward this Absolute.

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.

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

Poetic experience is distinct in nature from mystical experience. Because poetry emanates from the free creativity of the spirit,it is from the very start oriented toward expression, and terminates in a word proffered, it wants to speak; whereas mystical because it emanates from the deepest longing of the spirit bent on knowing, tends of itself toward silence and internal fruition. Poetic experience is busy with the created world and the enigmatic and innumerable relations of existents with one another, not with the Principle of Being.

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

It is only through the mystery of the redeeming Incarnation that a Christian sees the proper dignity of human personality, and what it costs. The idea which he has of it stretches out indefinitely, and only attains the absolute fullness of its significance in Christ. But by the very fact that it is secular and not sacred, this common task does not in the least demand in its beginning a profession of faith in the whole of Christianity from each man. On the contrary, it includes in its characteristic features a pluralism which makes possible the convivium of Christians and non-Christians in one temporal city.

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.

Art and poetry cannot do without one another. Yet the two words are far from being synonymous. By Art I mean the creative or producing, work-making activity of the human mind. By Poetry I mean, not the particular art which consists in writing verses, but a process both more general and more primary: that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination (as was realized in ancient times; the Latin vates was both a poet and a diviner). Poetry, in this sense, is the secret life of each and all of the arts.

It is necessary that the object that the artist is shaping, whether it be a vase of clay or a fishing boat, be significant of something other than itself. This object must be a sign as well as an object; a meaning must animate it, and make it say more than it is.

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

Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.

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.

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

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.

That is why I think, in defiance of Plato, that there is at once error and vulgarity in saying that poetry is a lie, except in the sense that Cocteau wrote one day: I am a lie who always tells the truth. The only poetry which lies purely and simply is academic, pseudo-classical, conceptually repetitive poetry, and it is not poetry.

There is no question that the language of "felt thought" must be quarried from our personal depths. Like the best gold, it does not lie on the surface.

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

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

Power without authority is tyranny.

Authentic Christianity has a horror of the pessimism of inertia. It is pessimist, profoundly pessimist in the sense that it knows that the creature comes from nothingness, and that all that issues from nothing essentially tends of itself to return to nothing: but it's optimism is incomparably deeper than it's pessimism; for it knows that the creature comes from God, and all that comes from God tends to return to Him.

There is no place in the world but contains some trace of God.

A true Christian is a man who never for a moment forgets what God has done for him in Christ and whose whole comportment and whose activity have their root in the sentiment of gratitude.

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.

It is not enough for a population or a section of the population to have Christian faith and be docile to the ministers of religion in order to be in a position properly to judge political matters. If this population has no political experience, no taste for seeing clearly for itself nor a tradition of initiative and critical judgment, its position with respect to politics grows more complicated, for nothing is easier for political counterfeiters than to exploit good principles for purposes of deception, and nothing is more disastrous than good principles badly applied. And moreover nothing is easier for human weakness than to merge religion with prejudices of race, family or class, collective hatreds, passions of a clan and political phantoms which compensate for the rigors of individual discipline in a pious but insufficiently purified soul. Politics deal with matters and interests of the world and they depend upon passions natural to man and upon reason. But the point I wish to make here is that without goodness, love and charity, all that is best in us - even divine faith, but passions and reason much more so - turns in our hands to an unhappy use. The point is that right political experience cannot develop in people unless passions and reason are oriented by a solid basis of collective virtues, by faith and honor and thirst for justice. The point is that, without the evangelical instinct and the spiritual potential of a living Christianity, political judgment and politic

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

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.

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

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