Jacques Maritain Quotes
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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.
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To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being.
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It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist.
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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.
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The tragedy of the modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in realizing democracy.
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Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves.
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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.
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The only artist who does not deserve respect is the one who works to please the public, for commercial success or for official success.
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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.
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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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God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth
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In loving things and the being in them man should rather draw things up to the human level than reduce humanity to their measure.
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A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.
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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.
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Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it.
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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.
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To redeem creation the saint wages war on the entire fabric of creation, with the bare weapons of truth and love.
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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.
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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.
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In each of us there dwells a mystery, and that mystery is the human personality.
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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.
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God's love causes the beauty of what He loves, our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.
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Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
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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.
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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.
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There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world.
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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.
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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.
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We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve
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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.
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