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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
Americans
Seem
Serious
Seems
Dams
Sometimes
Frowning
Must
Bore
Believe
Bores
Thinking
Thinker

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A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.
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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.
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The tragedy of the modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in realizing democracy.
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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.
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The love of Americans for their country is not an indulgent, it is an exacting and chastising love they cannot tolerate its defects.
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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.
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Some truths are seen better through tears.
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We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve
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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.
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There is no place in the world but contains some trace of God.
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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 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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To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being.
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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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Let us not go faster than God. It is our emptiness and our thirst that He needs, not our plentitude.
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There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.
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Power without authority is tyranny.
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The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.
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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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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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