Jacques Maritain quotes

Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings focused on topics such as metaphysics, ethics, and the relationship between faith and reason. He played a key role in promoting human rights and Christian humanism. Here are 47 of his quotes:

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

Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.

Jacques Maritain

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

Jacques Maritain

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

Jacques Maritain

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

Jacques Maritain

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

Jacques Maritain

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

Jacques Maritain

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

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

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

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

The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.

Jacques Maritain

A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.

Jacques Maritain

Thus society is born, as something required by nature, and (because this nature is human nature) as something accomplished through a work of reason and will, and freely consented to. Man is a political animal, which means that the human person craves political life, communal life, not only with regard to the family community, but with regard to the civil community.

Jacques Maritain

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

Jacques Maritain

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

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

Jacques Maritain

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

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

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

Jacques Maritain

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

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

Jacques Maritain