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

Jacques Maritain

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Jacques Maritain
Age: 90 †
Born: 1882
Born: November 18
Died: 1973
Died: April 28
Diplomat
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Writer
Paris
France
Serve
Truth
Need
Needs

More quotes by Jacques Maritain

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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.
Jacques Maritain
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Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so dam serious.
Jacques Maritain
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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.
Jacques Maritain
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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.
Jacques Maritain
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The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.
Jacques Maritain
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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.
Jacques Maritain
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The division between the useful arts and the fine arts must not be understood in too absolute a manner. In the humblest work of the craftsmen, if art is there, there is a concern for beauty, through a kind of indirect repercussion that the requirements of the creativity of the spirit exercise upon the production of an object to serve human needs.
Jacques Maritain
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The aim of education is to guide young persons in the process through which they shape themselves as human persons-armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, and moral virtues-while at the same time conveying to them the spiritual heritage of the nation and the civilization in which they are involved.
Jacques Maritain
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Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.
Jacques Maritain
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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.
Jacques Maritain
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The tragedy of the modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in realizing democracy.
Jacques Maritain
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There is no place in the world but contains some trace of God.
Jacques Maritain
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In loving things and the being in them man should rather draw things up to the human level than reduce humanity to their measure.
Jacques Maritain
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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 .
Jacques Maritain
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Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it.
Jacques Maritain
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It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist.
Jacques Maritain
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The light of common sense is fundamentally the same light as that of science, that is to say, the natural light of the intellect. But in common sense this light does not return upon itself by critical reflection, and is not perfected by what we shall learn to know as a scientific habit.
Jacques Maritain
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There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.
Jacques Maritain
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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.
Jacques Maritain
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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.
Jacques Maritain