Jacques Maritain Quotes

31 quotes in 508 categories

• Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so dam serious.
• 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…
• A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.
• 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…
• 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…
• Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
• 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,…
• The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people.
• 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…
• The tragedy of modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in effecting democracy.
• The love of Americans for their country is not an indulgent, it is an exacting and chastising love; they cannot tolerate its defects.

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