Jacques Maritain Quotes (1882-1973)

“The truth of practical intellect is understood not as conformity to an extramental being but as conformity to a right desire; the end is no longer to know what is, but to bring into existence that which is not yet.”

“Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment.”

“Contrary to Pascal's saying, we don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.”

“It is enough that things exist for God to be unavoidable. Let us but grant to a bit of moss or the smallest ant its due nature as an ontological reality, and we can no longer escape the terrifying hand that made us.”

“Philosophy is the science by which the natural light of reason studies the first causes or highest principles of all things – is, in other words, the science of things in their first causes, in so far as these belong to the natural order.”

“It would be a great mistake to look upon racism as an irrational doctrine: racism is not a doctrine of irrationalism, it is the very surging up of irrationalism as an elemental force, getting rid of all doctrine, truth and rational structure.”

“Now Faulhaber was a real Rosicrucian and a very ardent one, and one is justified in assuming, in spite of Baillet's denials, that Descartes found in him the man he was seeking, and that through him Descartes entered into direct contact with the intellectual atmosphere of the Rosecrucians. Might not such contact, however fleeting, have a declining influence upon the moral lines and aims of the philosopher's life? May we not even ask ourselves whether at its origin. Descartes' great idea did not permit the supposition that he intended—an intention that became hazier as time went on—fearlessly to transpose to the plane of everyday reason and of the most widespread common sense the design followed on the plane of alchemic mysteries by the naive Rosicrucians, and in doing so render it much less "uplifted," but much more efficacious—mathematics replacing the Cabala leading to universal knowledge, the hermetic sciences and their occult qualities giving place henceforth to geometric physics and the art of mechanics, as the elixir of life to the laws of rational medicine?”

“Instead of being a whited sepulchre like the Pharisees of all times, he was a charred blackened cathedral.”

“I also have a great intellectual respect for those who followed him (Husserl), Heidegger in particular, and among my countrymen, men like Paul Ricoeur (who, however, I am still far from trusting), and Mircea Eliade (a great explorer but one who does not want to be a guide, thank goodness. I have none for Jean-Paul Sartre, who seems to me too artful, and who besides (and here he pleases me) would be quite sorry to find himself respected. (Yet I like to imagine him elected to the Academie Fancaise, an honor which he certainly deserves.) But he has offered a testimony we would be quite wrong to neglect.”