Jacques Maritain > Quotes

“We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve”
― Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge

“gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.”
― Jacques Maritain

“The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence -- even mental.”
― Jacques Maritain, An Introduction to Philosophy

“Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil, the civilized heritage of a consistent and integrated system of beliefs and values; its normal horizon , the infinity of human experience enlighted by the passionate insight of anguish or the intellectual virtues of a contemplative mind.”
― Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

“If books were judged by the bad uses man can put them to, what book has been more misused than the Bible?”
― Jacques Maritain

“The definition of Christian art is to be found in its subject and its spirit. Everything, sacred and profane, belongs to it. God does not ask for “religious” art or “Catholic” art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth.”
― Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism With Other Essays

“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

“Il faut avoir l'esprit dur et le coeur sensible”
― Jacques Maritain

“If at the present day it has found a warm welcome among certain circles in Europe, it is because all those who hope to derive from humanitarianism a moral code of human kindness for the acceptance of an atheistic society are already implicitly Buddhists.”
― Jacques Maritain, An Introduction to Philosophy

“It is not enough for a population or a section of the population to have Christian faith and be docile to the ministers of religion in order to be in a position properly to judge political matters. If this population has no political experience, no taste for seeing clearly for itself nor a tradition of initiative and critical judgment, its position with respect to politics grows more complicated, for nothing is easier for political counterfeiters than to exploit good principles for purposes of deception, and nothing is more disastrous than good principles badly applied. And moreover nothing is easier for human weakness than to merge religion with prejudices of race, family or class, collective hatreds, passions of a clan and political phantoms which compensate for the rigors of individual discipline in a pious but insufficiently purified soul. Politics deal with matters and interests of the world and they depend upon passions natural to man and upon reason. But the point I wish to make here is that without goodness, love and charity, all that is best in us—even divine faith, but passions and reason much more so—turns in our hands to an unhappy use. The point is that right political experience cannot develop in people unless passions and reason are oriented by a solid basis of collective virtues, by faith and honor and thirst for justice. The point is that, without the evangelical instinct and the spiritual potential of a living Christianity, political judgment and political experience are ill protected against the illusions of selfishness and fear; without courage, compassion for mankind and the spirit of sacrifice, the ever-thwarted advance toward an historical ideal of generosity and fraternity is not conceivable.”
― Jacques Maritain, Christianity & Democracy (Essay Index Reprint Series)

“In answer to our question then, ‘What is man?’ we may give the Greek, Jewish, and Christian idea of man: man as an animal endowed with reason, whose supreme dignity is in the intellect; and man as a free individual in personal relation with God, whose supreme righteousness consists in voluntarily obeying the law of God; and man as a sinful and wounded creature called to divine life and to the freedom of grace, whose supreme perfection consists of love. . . . A person possesses absolute dignity because he is in direct relationship with the realm of being, truth, goodness, and beauty, and with God, and it is only with these that he can arrive at his complete fulfillment. His spiritual fatherland consists of the entire order of things which have absolute value, and which reflect, in some manner, a divine Absolute superior to the world and which have a power of attraction toward this Absolute.”
― Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads

“In periods when shallow speculation is rife, one might think that metaphysics would shine forth, at least, by the brilliance of its modest reserve. But the very age that is unaware of the majesty of metaphysics, likewise overlooks its poverty. Its majesty? It is wisdom. Its poverty? It is human science.”
― Jacques Maritain

“Authentic Christianity has a horror of the pessimism of inertia. It is pessimist, profoundly pessimist in the sense that it knows that the creature comes from nothingness, and that all that issues from nothing essentially tends of itself to return to nothing: but it's optimism is incomparably deeper than it's pessimism; for it knows that the creature comes from God, and all that comes from God tends to return to Him.”
― Jacques Maritain, True Humanism

“Je treba povedať, že umelec slúži kráse a poézii, slúži teda absolútnu, miluje absolútno, je v zajatí absolútna lásou, ktorá si vyžaduje celú jeho bytosť, telo aj dušu. nemôže súhlasiť so žiadnym rozdelením. kúsok neba skrytý v temnom príbytku jeho ducha...”
― Jacques Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist

“God does not ask for “religious” art or “Catholic” art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth.”
― Jacques Maritain

“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, Existence and the Existent

“Fascism is socialism which has been clever enough to fool the vigilance of the church, as no other socialism has done.”
― Jacques Maritain

“It is only through the mystery of the redeeming Incarnation that a Christian sees the proper dignity of human personality, and what it costs. The idea which he has of it stretches out indefinitely, and only attains the absolute fullness of its significance in Christ. But by the very fact that it is secular and not sacred, this common task does not in the least demand in its beginning a profession of faith in the whole of Christianity from each man. On the contrary, it includes in its characteristic features a pluralism which makes possible the convivium of Christians and non-Christians in one temporal city.”
― Jacques Maritain, True Humanism

“The primary duty of the modern State of the enforcement of social justice.”
― Jacques Maritain, Man and the State

“I do not know if Saul Alinsky knows God. But I assure you that God knows Saul Alinsky.”
― Jacques Maritain

“If we interpret St. Augustine in material terms, by the pure light of a reason which is not truly theological but geometric, his teaching seems to annihilate the creature. As a result of original sin man is taken to be essentially corrupt; that is the doctrine of Luther, of Calvin, of Jansenius.
Is not this the purest pessimism? Nature is corrupted in its essence by original sin; and under grace it remains corrupt, grace being here not life, but a covering cloak. Yes, it is the purest pessimism: but there is a singular result. Human nature before sin possessed as its due all the privileges of Adam. Now this corrupt man, who can merit nothing for Heaven, and whom faith covers with Christs grace as with a cloak, has nevertheless a value here on earth, even as he is and according to what he is, in the very corruption of his nature. Make way there for this sullied creature, since man must live in the hell which is this world!
Such is the dialectic, the tragedy of the protestant conscience, with its admirably vivid and aching sense, but too purely human, too darkly human sense of mortal misery and sin. The creature declares its nothingness. But this declaration is its own. Man is a walking corruption; but this irremediably corrupt nature cries out to God, and the initiative, do what one will, is thus man’s battle cry.”
― Jacques Maritain, True Humanism

“Poetry does not like noise.”
― Jacques Maritain

“To try to reduce democracy to technocracy, and to expel from it the Gospel inspiration together with all faith in the supra-material, supra-mathematical, and supra-sensory realities, would be to try to deprive it of its very blood. Democracy can only live on Gospel inspiration.”
― Jacques Maritain, Man and the State

“očistený prameň pramení z hlbín ľudskej substancie.. nie je však plný kalu. je to dielo.. predovšetkým pretrvávajúcej lásky.. a umenie očistenej duše si používa všetko, aj blato, na slávu diela, čistými rukami a bez zaľúbenia v kale.”
― Jacques Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist

“The body politic also contains in its superior unity the family units, whose essential rights and freedoms are anterior to itself, and a multiplicity of other particular societies which proceed from the free initiative of citizens and should be as autonomous as possible. Such is the element of pluralism inherent in every truly political society.”
― Jacques Maritain, Man and the State

“Modern civilization is a worn-out vesture: it is not a question of sewing on patches here and there, but of a total and substantial reformation, a trans-valuation of its cultural principles; since what is needed is a change to the primacy of quality over quantity, of work over money, of the human over technical means, of wisdom over science, of the common service of human beings instead of the covetousness of unlimited individual enrichment or a desire in the name of the State for unlimited power.”
― Jacques Maritain, True Humanism

“The primary duty of the modern State is the enforcement of social justice.”
― Jacques Maritain, Man and the State

“Platón tvrdil, že filozof musí filozofovať celou svojou dušou (aj keď vlastným orgánom filozofie je iba rozum). to isté môžeme povedať o umelcovi.”
― Jacques Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist

“In the final analysis, the relation of the individual to society must not be conceived after the atomistic and mechanistic pattern of bourgeois individualism which destroys the organic social totality, or after the biological and animal pattern of the statist or racist totalitarian conception which swallows up the person, here reduced to a mere histological element of Behemoth or Leviathan, in the body of the state, or after the biological and industrial pattern of the Communistic conception which ordains the entire person, like a worker in the great human hive, to the proper work of the social whole. The relation of the individual to society must be conceived after an irreducibly human and specifically ethicosocial pattern, that is, personalist and communalist at the same time; the organization to be accomplished is one of liberties. But an organization of liberty is is unthinkable apart from the amoral realities of justice and civil amity, which, on the natural and temporal plane, correspond to what the Gospel calls brotherly love on the spiritual and supernatural plane. This brings us back to our considerations of the manner in which the paradox of social life is resolved in a progressive movement that will never be terminated here-below. There is a common work to be accomplished by the social whole as such. This whole, of which human person are the parts, is not ‘neutral’ but is itself committed and bound by a temporal vocation. Thus the persons are subordinated to this common work. Nevertheless, not only in the political order, is it essential to the common good to flow back upon the persons, but also in another order where that which is most profound in the person, its supra-temporal vocation and the goods connected with it, is a transcendent end, it is essential that society itself and its common work are indirectly subordinated. This follows from the fact that the principal value of the common work of society is the freedom of expansion of the person together with all the guarantees which this freedom implies and the diffusion of good that flows from it. In short, the political common good is a common good of human persons. And thus it turns out that, in subordinating oneself to this common work, by the grace of justice and amity, each one of us is trill subordinated to the good of persons, to the accomplishment of the personal life of others an, at the same time, to the interior dignity of ones own person. But for this solution to be practical, there must be full recognition in the city of the true nature of the common work and, at the same time, recognition also of the importance and political worth--so nicely perceived by Aristotle--of the virtue of amity.”
― Jacques Maritain, Person and the Common Good

“Boh sa svojím Slovom a svojím umením dotýka všetkého, čo koná, svojím umením všetko riadi a uvádza do bytia. rovnako tak sa má aj umelec svojím umením dotýkať celého svojho diela, svojím umením ho riadiť a uvádzať do bytia... teológovia nám hovoria, že všetko bolo stvorené PER VERBUM, skrze Božské Slovo, ale aj napriek tomu je pravda, že všetko bolo stvorené celou nerozdeliteľnou Trojicou: spôsobom úplne zbaveným sebanajmenšieho zainteresovaného záujmu, ničmenej pre určitý cieľ, pre cieľ, ktorým nebola jednoducho dokonalosť diela, ktoré malo byť dosiahnuté, ale pre cieľ vyššieho rádu než je umenie - pre zdelenie Božej dobroty.”
― Jacques Maritain, The Responsibility of the Artist