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
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.
There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.
Nothing is more human than for man to desire naturally things impossible to his nature. It is, indeed, the property of a nature which is not closed up in matter like the nature of physical things, but which is intellectual or infinitized by the spirit. It is the property of a metaphysical nature. Such desires reach for the infinite, because the intellect thirsts for being and being is infinite.
We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities.
A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.
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.
It has never been recommended to confuse "loving" with "seeking to please"... ...Salome pleased Herod's guests; I can hardly believe she was burning with love for them. As for poor John the Baptist... ...she certainly did not envelop him in her love.
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.
When one's function is to teach the loftiest wisdom, it is difficult to resist the temptation to believe that until you have spoken, nothing has been said.
Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.
Nothing is more vain than to seek to unite men by a philosophic minimum.
Things are opaque to us, and we are opaque to ourselves.
In loving things and the being in them man should rather draw things up to the human level than reduce humanity to their measure.
In each of us there dwells a mystery, and that mystery is the human personality.