Quote

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

Jacques Maritain

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
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
Image
To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being.
Jacques Maritain
Image
The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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
Image
Whereas the intelligence of God is both the cause and the measure of the truth of things, things are both the cause and the measure of the truth of our intelligence.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
Jacques Maritain
Image
The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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
Image
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.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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
Image
The love of Americans for their country is not an indulgent, it is an exacting and chastising love they cannot tolerate its defects.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.
Jacques Maritain
Image
There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.
Jacques Maritain
Image
With all his sincerity and devotion, the authentic, absolute atheist is after all only an abortive saint, and at the same time, a mistaken revolutionist.
Jacques Maritain
Image
There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world.
Jacques Maritain