Top 15 Jacques Maritain Quotes

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”.

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.

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 has never been recommended to confuse "loving" with "seeking to please"… ...Salome pleased Herod's guests; I can hardly believe she was burning with love for them. As for poor John the Baptist... ...she certainly did not envelop him in her love.

It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist.

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

In point of fact, Western philosophy has never set itself free of Christianity: wherever Christianity did not have a hand in the construction of modern philosophy it served instead as a stumbling block.

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.

The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.

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

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.

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.

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