Quote

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.

Jacques Maritain

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jacques Maritain
Age: 90 †
Born: 1882
Born: November 18
Died: 1973
Died: April 28
Diplomat
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Writer
Paris
France
Sincerity
Devotion
Atheist
Absolutes
Absolute
Abortive
Saint
Revolutionist
Time
Authentic
Mistaken

More quotes by Jacques Maritain

Image
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.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Let us not go faster than God. It is our emptiness and our thirst that He needs, not our plentitude.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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.
Jacques Maritain
Image
There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.
Jacques Maritain
Image
The love of Americans for their country is not an indulgent, it is an exacting and chastising love they cannot tolerate its defects.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Power without authority is tyranny.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Some truths are seen better through tears.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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.
Jacques Maritain
Image
In loving things and the being in them man should rather draw things up to the human level than reduce humanity to their measure.
Jacques Maritain
Image
There is no place in the world but contains some trace of God.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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
Image
There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world.
Jacques Maritain
Image
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.
Jacques Maritain