Quotes from Jacques Maritain

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

The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.

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.

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.

What makes man most unhappy is to be deprived not of that which he had, but of that which he did not have, and did not really know.

Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy

Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.

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

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

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

We are not the same persons this year as last nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

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

gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.

The sole philosophy open to those who doubt the possibility of truth is absolute silence -- even mental.

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.

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

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.

Il faut avoir l'esprit dur et le coeur sensible

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.

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.

Je treba poveda?, že umelec slúži kráse a poézii, slúži teda absolútnu, miluje absolútno, je v zajatí absolútna lásou, ktorá si vyžaduje celú jeho bytos?, telo aj dušu. nemôže súhlasi? so žiadnym rozdelením. kúsok neba skrytý v temnom príbytku jeho ducha...

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.

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.

dôležitejší je fakt, že ke? sa láska zmocní ?loveka - nechcem poveda? hocijaká láska, hovorím o láske k Bohu a k blížnemu, - celú subjektivitu o?is?uje, a tým o?is?uje aj prame? tvorby.