Jacques Maritain Quotes

French philosopher (1882–1973)

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Jacques Maritain (18 November 1882 – 28 April 1973) was a French Catholic philosopher, and was one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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Similar: Thomas Aquinas 83.0% Immanuel Kant 82.9% Simone Weil 82.3% Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 82.3% Blaise Pascal 80.8% William James 80.6% Plato 80.6% George Holmes Howison 80.4% Albert Einstein 80.4% Friedrich Nietzsche 80.3%

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

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.

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.

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

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

It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.