Jacques Maritain

The supernatural light of the spirit is the only night from which the spirit can emerge alive.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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