Quotes from Jacques Maritain

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.

If books were judged by the bad uses man can put them to, what book has been more misused than the Bible?

The definition of Christian art is to be found in its subject and its spirit. Everything, sacred and profane, belongs to it. God does not ask for "religious" art or "Catholic" art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth.

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.

Authentic Christianity has a horror of the pessimism of inertia. It is pessimist, profoundly pessimist in the sense that it knows that the creature comes from nothingness, and that all that issues from nothing essentially tends of itself to return to nothing: but it's optimism is incomparably deeper than it's pessimism; for it knows that the creature comes from God, and all that comes from God tends to return to Him.

Fascism is socialism which has been clever enough to fool the vigilance of the church, as no other socialism has done.

I do not know if Saul Alinsky knows God. But I assure you that God knows Saul Alinsky.

The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies.

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