Quote

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

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A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.
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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 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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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 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 act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.
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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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The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.
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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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Power without authority is tyranny.
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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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It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist.
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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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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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There is no place in the world but contains some trace of God.
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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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Some truths are seen better through tears.
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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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