Jacques Maritain Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Jacques Maritain's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Philosopher Jacques Maritain's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 71 quotes on this page collected since November 18, 1882! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
All quotes by Jacques Maritain: Art Atheism Atheist Desire Intuition Lying Philosophy Soul Virtue more...
  • 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.

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

    "Freedom in the Modern World". Book by Jacques Maritain (p. 6), 1933.
  • It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist.

    Jacques Maritain (2013). “The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time”, p.89, Wipf and Stock Publishers
  • 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.

    Art   Latin   Writing  
  • The tragedy of the modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in realizing democracy.

  • Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves.

    Opaque  
    Jacques Maritain (1959). “Distinguish to Unite: Or, The Degrees of Knowledge”, New York, Scribner
  • 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.

    Church   Hell   Efficacy  
    Jacques Maritain (1997). “Untrammeled approaches”
  • The only artist who does not deserve respect is the one who works to please the public, for commercial success or for official success.

    Artist   Doe   Please  
  • 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.

    Jacques Maritain (2013). “The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time”, p.9, Wipf and Stock Publishers
  • The love of Americans for their country is not an indulgent, it is an exacting and chastising love; they cannot tolerate its defects.

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

    Jacques Maritain, Jean Cocteau (2014). “Art and Faith: Letters between Jacques Maritain and Jean Cocteau”, p.47, Open Road Media
  • In loving things and the being in them man should rather draw things up to the human level than reduce humanity to their measure.

    Men   Humanity   Levels  
    "True Humanism". Book by Jacques Maritain (p. xv), 1938.
  • A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.

    Jacques Maritain (2015). “On the Use of Philosophy: Three Essays”, p.5, Princeton University Press
  • 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.

    Quoted in Robert Fitzgerald (ed) Enlarging the Change (1985).
  • Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it.

    Inspiration   Mind   Doe  
    Jacques Maritain (2012). “Christianity and Democracy, the Rights of Man and Natural Law”, p.36, Ignatius Press
  • 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.

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

    War   And Love   Saint  
    Jacques Maritain (1966). “A Maritain Reader: Selected Writings”
  • 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.

    Jacques Maritain (2015). “Existence and the Existent”, p.104, Paulist Press
  • 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.

    Running   Heart   Men  
    Jacques Maritain (1955). “An essay on Christian philosophy”
  • In each of us there dwells a mystery, and that mystery is the human personality.

    Jacques Maritain (2012). “Christianity and Democracy, the Rights of Man and Natural Law”, p.65, Ignatius Press
  • 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.

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

    Jacques Maritain (2007). “Art and Scholasticism with Other Essays”, p.31, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.
  • Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.

  • 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.

    Jacques Maritain (2015). “Approaches to God”, p.72, Paulist Press
  • 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.

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

    World   Rooms   Poet  
    "Ransoming the Time". Book by Jacques Maritain (p. 14), 1941.
  • 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.

    Jacques Maritain (2013). “The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time”, p.147, Wipf and Stock Publishers
  • 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.

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

    Needs  
  • 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.

    Jacques Maritain (1966). “A Maritain Reader: Selected Writings”
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 71 quotes from the Philosopher Jacques Maritain, starting from November 18, 1882! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    Jacques Maritain quotes about: Art Atheism Atheist Desire Intuition Lying Philosophy Soul Virtue