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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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Jacques Maritain
Age: 90 †
Born: 1882
Born: November 18
Died: 1973
Died: April 28
Diplomat
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Writer
Paris
France
Must
Bore
Believe
Bores
Thinking
Thinker
Americans
Seem
Serious
Seems
Dams
Sometimes
Frowning

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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.
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Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
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The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies.
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To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being.
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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.
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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.
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The only artist who does not deserve respect is the one who works to please the public, for commercial success or for official success.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.
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A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.
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Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Power without authority is tyranny.
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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.
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God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth
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