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
Some truths are seen better through tears.
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.
The only artist who does not deserve respect is the one who works to please the public, for commercial success or for official success.
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 .
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.
The tragedy of modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in effecting democracy.
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.
Let us not go faster than God. It is our emptiness and our thirst that He needs, not our plentitude.
We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve
Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it.
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
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.