Jacques Maritain
Jacques Maritain
Jacques Maritainwas a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a Protestant, he became an agnostic before converting to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times, and was influential in the development and drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pope Paul VI presented his "Message to Men of Thought and of Science" at the close of Vatican II to Maritain, his long-time friend and mentor. Maritain's interest...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth18 November 1882
CountryFrance
Jacques Maritain quotes about
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.
A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.
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.
Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth
The tragedy of modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in effecting democracy.
Some truths are seen better through tears.
The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies.
That is why I think, in defiance of Plato, that there is at once error and vulgarity in saying that poetry is a lie, except in the sense that Cocteau wrote one day: I am a lie who always tells the truth. The only poetry which lies purely and simply is academic, pseudo-classical, conceptually repetitive poetry, and it is not poetry.
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.
Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves.
Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.
We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities.