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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.

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
Faith
Absolute
Internals
Away
Catholic
Internal
Firsts
Necessarily
Reverse
Proclaims
First
Commitment
Phenomenon
Inconsistency
Must
Atheism
Contemporary
Gear
Full
Starts
Vanish
Religious
Atheist
Gears
Religion
Absolutes
Blown

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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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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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There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world.
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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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Let us not go faster than God. It is our emptiness and our thirst that He needs, not our plentitude.
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The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies.
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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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There is no place in the world but contains some trace of God.
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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.
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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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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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Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.
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Some truths are seen better through tears.
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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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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 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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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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The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.
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