Jacques Maritain Quotes

Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment. Here we have the first internal inconsistency of contemporary atheism: it proclaims that all religion must necessarily vanish away, and it is itself a religious phenomena.

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

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.

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.

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

A community of free men cannot exist if its spiritual base is not solely law.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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