Jacques Maritain Quotes

The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.