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… - Jacques Maritain

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