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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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We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve
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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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Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.
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To redeem creation the saint wages war on the entire fabric of creation, with the bare weapons of truth and love.
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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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To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being.
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The tragedy of the modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in realizing democracy.
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Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.
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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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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.
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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 aim of education is to guide young persons in the process through which they shape themselves as human persons-armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, and moral virtues-while at the same time conveying to them the spiritual heritage of the nation and the civilization in which they are involved.
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A true Christian is a man who never for a moment forgets what God has done for him in Christ and whose whole comportment and whose activity have their root in the sentiment of gratitude.
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Power without authority is tyranny.
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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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A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.
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Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
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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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Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
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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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