Jacques Maritain Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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”.

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

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.

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

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

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