Jacques Maritain Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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 phenomena.

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

It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist.

The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.

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

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

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

Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves.

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.

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.

It is not possible to escape from the results of the irruption of faith into the structures of our knowledge.