Jacques Maritain Men Quotations

Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.

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

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

Nothing is more vain than to seek to unite men by a philosophic minimum.

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

Every work of art reaches man in his inner powers. It reaches him more profoundly and insidiously than any rational proposition, either cogent demonstration or sophistry. For it strikes him with two terrible weapons, Intuition and Beauty, and at the single root in him of all his energies... Art and Poetry awaken the dreams of man, and his longings, and reveal to him some of the abysses he has in himself.

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

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.

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.

Thus society is born, as something required by nature, and (because this nature is human nature) as something accomplished through a work of reason and will, and freely consented to. Man is a political animal, which means that the human person craves political life, communal life, not only with regard to the family community, but with regard to the civil community.

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

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.

Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.

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.