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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.

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
Difficult
Nothing
Loftiest
Believe
Resist
Spoken
Temptation
Function
Wisdom
Teach

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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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Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
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Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.
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Some truths are seen better through tears.
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Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
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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 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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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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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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We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve
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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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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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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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Whereas the intelligence of God is both the cause and the measure of the truth of things, things are both the cause and the measure of the truth of our intelligence.
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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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God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth
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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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A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.
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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 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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