Jacques Maritain Quotations

Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so dam serious.

We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities.

Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.

Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.

A man of courage flees forward in the midst of new things.

The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.

A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.

The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people.

I don't see America as a mainland, but as a sea, a big ocean. Sometimes a storm arises, a formidable current develops, and it seems it will engulf everything. Wait a moment, another current will appear and bring the first one to naught.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

In each of us there dwells a mystery, and that mystery is the human personality.

To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being.

The light of common sense is fundamentally the same light as that of science, that is to say, the natural light of the intellect. But in common sense this light does not return upon itself by critical reflection, and is not perfected by what we shall learn to know as a scientific habit.

The more the poet grows, the deeper the level of creative intuition descends into the density of his soul. Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing now, he must dig deeper.

The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence -- even mental.

At each epoch of history the world was in a hopeless state, and at each epoch of history the world muddled through; at each epoch the world was lost, and at each epoch it was saved.

Authority and power are two different things: power is the force by means of which you can oblige others to obey you. Authority is the right to direct and command, to be listened to or obeyed by others. Authority requests power. Power without authority is tyranny.

Art and poetry cannot do without one another. Yet the two words are far from being synonymous. By Art I mean the creative or producing, work-making activity of the human mind. By Poetry I mean, not the particular art which consists in writing verses, but a process both more general and more primary: that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination (as was realized in ancient times; the Latin vates was both a poet and a diviner). Poetry, in this sense, is the secret life of each and all of the arts.

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.

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

Poetic experience is distinct in nature from mystical experience. Because poetry emanates from the free creativity of the spirit,it is from the very start oriented toward expression, and terminates in a word proffered, it wants to speak; whereas mystical because it emanates from the deepest longing of the spirit bent on knowing, tends of itself toward silence and internal fruition. Poetic experience is busy with the created world and the enigmatic and innumerable relations of existents with one another, not with the Principle of Being.

It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist.

The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.

Art is a creative effort of which the wellsprings lie in the spirit, and which brings us at once the most intimate self of the artist and the secret concurrences which he has perceived in things by means of a vision or intuition all his own, and not to be expressed in ideas and in words-expressible only in the work of art.

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.

There is no place in the world but contains some trace of God.

It is implanted in the Christian soul, by the side of the running waters, under the sky of the theological virtues, amid the breaths of the seven gifts of the Spirit. It is natural for it to bear Christian fruit.

That is why I think, in defiance of Plato, that there is at once error and vulgarity in saying that poetry is a lie, except in the sense that Cocteau wrote one day: I am a lie who always tells the truth. The only poetry which lies purely and simply is academic, pseudo-classical, conceptually repetitive poetry, and it is not poetry.

Power without authority is tyranny.

The spiritual experience of the philosopher is the nourishing soil of philosophy; that without it there is no philosophy; and that, even so, spiritual experience does not, or must not, enter into the intelligible texture of philosophy. The pulp of the fruit must consist of nothing but the truth.

Every work of art reaches man in his inner powers. It reaches him more profoundly and insidiously than any rational proposition, either cogent demonstration or sophistry. For it strikes him with two terrible weapons, Intuition and Beauty, and at the single root in him of all his energies... Art and Poetry awaken the dreams of man, and his longings, and reveal to him some of the abysses he has in himself.

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

There is no question that the language of "felt thought" must be quarried from our personal depths. Like the best gold, it does not lie on the surface.

The love of Americans for their country is not an indulgent, it is an exacting and chastising love; they cannot tolerate its defects.

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

What makes man most unhappy is to be deprived not of that which he had, but of that which he did not have, and did not really know.

A true Christian is a man who never for a moment forgets what God has done for him in Christ and whose whole comportment and whose activity have their root in the sentiment of gratitude.

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

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.

The aim of education is to guide young persons in the process through which they shape themselves as human persons-armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, and moral virtues-while at the same time conveying to them the spiritual heritage of the nation and the civilization in which they are involved.

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.

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

Nothing is more human than for man to desire naturally things impossible to his nature. It is, indeed, the property of a nature which is not closed up in matter like the nature of physical things, but which is intellectual or infinitized by the spirit. It is the property of a metaphysical nature. Such desires reach for the infinite, because the intellect thirsts for being and being is infinite.

It is necessary that the object that the artist is shaping, whether it be a vase of clay or a fishing boat, be significant of something other than itself. This object must be a sign as well as an object; a meaning must animate it, and make it say more than it is.

God's love causes the beauty of what He loves, our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.

Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil, the civilized heritage of a consistent and integrated system of beliefs and values; its normal horizon , the infinity of human experience enlighted by the passionate insight of anguish or the intellectual virtues of a contemplative mind.

Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.

The division between the useful arts and the fine arts must not be understood in too absolute a manner. In the humblest work of the craftsmen, if art is there, there is a concern for beauty, through a kind of indirect repercussion that the requirements of the creativity of the spirit exercise upon the production of an object to serve human needs.

Some truths are seen better through tears.

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.

The only artist who does not deserve respect is the one who works to please the public, for commercial success or for official success.

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 .

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.

The tragedy of modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in effecting democracy.

Everywhere in the world the industrial regime tends to make the unorganized or unorganizable individual, the pauper, into the victim of a kind of human sacrifice offered to the gods of civilization.

Let us not go faster than God. It is our emptiness and our thirst that He needs, not our plentitude.

We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve

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

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

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 phenomenon.