Jacques Maritain quotes

Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy. (Jacques Maritain)
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence. View quote
Jacques Maritain
In each of us there dwells a mystery, and that mystery is the human personality. View quote
Jacques Maritain
There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism. View quote
Jacques Maritain
Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it. View quote
Jacques Maritain
To redeem creation the saint wages war on the entire fabric of creation, with the bare weapons of truth and love. View quote
Jacques Maritain
There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world. View quote
Jacques Maritain
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
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. (Jacques Maritain)
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher. View quote
Jacques Maritain
A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me. View quote
Jacques Maritain
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves. View quote
Jacques Maritain
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies. View quote
Jacques Maritain
In loving things and the being in them man should rather draw things up to the human level than reduce humanity to their measure. View quote
Jacques Maritain
Nothing is more vain than to seek to unite men by a philosophic minimum. (Jacques Maritain)
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being. View quote
Jacques Maritain
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself. View quote
Jacques Maritain