Top 60 Jacques Maritain Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.”

— Jacques Maritain

2. “The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies.”

— Jacques Maritain

3. “God does not ask for ‘religious’ art or ‘Catholic’ art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth.”

— Jacques Maritain

4. “Power without authority is tyranny.”

— Jacques Maritain

5. “In each of us there dwells a mystery, and that mystery is the human personality.”

— Jacques Maritain

6. “Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.”

— Jacques Maritain

7. “Some truths are seen better through tears.”

— Jacques Maritain

8. “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.”

— Jacques Maritain

9. “The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.”

— Jacques Maritain

10. “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.”

— Jacques Maritain

11. “Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment.”

— Jacques Maritain

12. “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.”

— Jacques Maritain

13. “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.”

— Jacques Maritain

14. “A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.”

— Jacques Maritain

15. “To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being.”

— Jacques Maritain

16. “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 right to direct and command, to be listened to or obeyed by others. Authority requests power. Power without authority is tyranny.”

— Jacques Maritain

17. “The only artist who does not deserve respect is the one who works to please the public, for commercial success or for official success.”

— Jacques Maritain

18. “God’s love causes the beauty of what He loves, our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.”

— Jacques Maritain

19. “The great and admirable strength of America consists in this, that America is truly the American people.”

— Jacques Maritain

20. “We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve.”

— Jacques Maritain

21. “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.”

— Jacques Maritain

22. “Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves.”

— Jacques Maritain

23. “Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.”

— Jacques Maritain

24. “The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence – even mental.”

— Jacques Maritain

25. “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 human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.”

— Jacques Maritain

26. “There is no place in the world but contains some trace of God.”

— Jacques Maritain

27. “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.”

— Jacques Maritain

28. “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.”

— Jacques Maritain

29. “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

30. “The more the poet grows, the deeper the level of creative intuition descends into the density of his soul. Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing now, he must dig deeper.”

— Jacques Maritain

31. “Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it.”

— Jacques Maritain

32. “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

33. “Nothing is more vain than to seek to unite men by a philosophic minimum.”

— Jacques Maritain

34. “The tragedy of modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in effecting democracy.”

— Jacques Maritain

35. “In loving things and the being in them man should rather draw things up to the human level than reduce humanity to their measure.”

— Jacques Maritain

36. “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 .”

— Jacques Maritain

37. “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.”

— Jacques Maritain

38. “It is necessary that the object that the artist is shaping, whether it be a vase of clay or a fishing boat, be significant of something other than itself. This object must be a sign as well as an object; a meaning must animate it, and make it say more than it is.”

— Jacques Maritain

39. “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

40. “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

41. “A man of courage flees forward in the midst of new things.”

— Jacques Maritain

42. “Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so dam serious.”

— Jacques Maritain

43. “The light of common sense is fundamentally the same light as that of science, that is to say, the natural light of the intellect. But in common sense this light does not return upon itself by critical reflection, and is not perfected by what we shall learn to know as a scientific habit.”

— Jacques Maritain

44. “The philosopher says that God’s knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man’s knowledge.”

— Jacques Maritain

45. “Let us not go faster than God. It is our emptiness and our thirst that He needs, not our plentitude.”

— Jacques Maritain

46. “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.”

— Jacques Maritain

47. “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

48. “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.”

— Jacques Maritain

49. “There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.”

— Jacques Maritain

50. “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 the world was lost, and at each epoch it was saved.”

— Jacques Maritain