Jacques Maritain quotes - page 2

It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist. (Jacques Maritain)
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences. View quote
Jacques Maritain
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
The supernatural light of the spirit is the only night from which the spirit can emerge alive. View quote
Jacques Maritain
A community of free men cannot exist if its spiritual base is not solely law. View quote
Jacques Maritain
It is enough that things exist for God to be unavoidable. Let us but grant to a bit of moss or the smallest ant its due nature as an ontological reality, and we can no longer escape the terrifying hand that made us. View quote
Jacques Maritain
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
What we need is not truths that serve us but a truth we may serve. View quote
Jacques Maritain
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence -- even mental. (Jacques Maritain)
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
It is not possible to escape from the results of the irruption of faith into the structures of our knowledge. View quote
Jacques Maritain
The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge. View quote
Jacques Maritain
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain
A man of courage flees forward in the midst of new things. View quote
Jacques Maritain
We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities. View quote
Jacques Maritain
Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious. View quote
Jacques Maritain
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together. View quote
Jacques Maritain
The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people. (Jacques Maritain)
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. View quote
Jacques Maritain