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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
Believe
Resist
Spoken
Temptation
Function
Wisdom
Teach
Difficult
Nothing
Loftiest

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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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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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A great philosopher in the wrong is like a beacon on the reefs which says to seamen: steer clear of me.
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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 equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies.
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Power without authority is tyranny.
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There is no place in the world but contains some trace of God.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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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 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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Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
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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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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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