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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
Dams
Seems
Frowning
Sometimes
Bore
Must
Bores
Believe
Thinking
Thinker

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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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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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The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies.
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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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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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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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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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The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.
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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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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 .
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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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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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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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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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