Quotes from Jacques Maritain

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.

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.

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

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

The love of Americans for their country is not an indulgent, it is an exacting and chastising love; they cannot tolerate its defects.

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.

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

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

There are absolute atheists ... Absolute atheism is in no way a mere absence of belief in God. It is rather a refusal of God, a fight against God, a challenge to God.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities.

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.

God's love causes the beauty of what He loves, our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.

We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve

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.

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.

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

Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.

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.