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
Truth
Need
Needs
Serve

More quotes by Jacques Maritain

Image
God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth
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
The tragedy of the modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in realizing democracy.
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
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
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
Image
Some truths are seen better through tears.
Jacques Maritain
Image
To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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
Image
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
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 philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.
Jacques Maritain
Image
The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Authority and power are two different things: power is the force by means of which you can oblige others to obey you. Authority is the right to direct and command, to be listened to or obeyed by others. Authority requests power. Power without authority is tyranny.
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
There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
Jacques Maritain
Image
At each epoch of history the world was in a hopeless state, and at each epoch of history the world muddled through at each epoch the world was lost, and at each epoch it was saved.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Let us not go faster than God. It is our emptiness and our thirst that He needs, not our plentitude.
Jacques Maritain