Jacques Maritain Quotes

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

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

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

It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.

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 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.

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

We have just seen that perfection and contemplation imply each other by reason of love which is at once the essence of perfecton and “the source, the execize and the end” of contemplation. One can also show this mutual implication by the stressing the fact that under the regime of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is the state proper to perfection and to contemplation all at once. Saint Thomas teaches that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are necessary for salvation, because we are too weak all by ourselves always to use as we should even the theological virtues and the infused moral virtues. […] For, as saint Bonavenure tell us, “the gifts immediately dispose one to contemplation”.