Jacques Maritain: Man

Jacques Maritain was French philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on man.
Jacques Maritain: 74 quotes4 likes

“In so far as we are individuals, each of us is a fragment of a species, a part of this universe, a single dot in the immense network of forces and influences, cosmic, ethnic, historic, whose laws we obey. We are subject to the determination of the physical world. But each man is also a person, he is not subject to the stars and atoms; for he subsists entirely with the very subsistence of his spiritual soul, and the latter is in him a principle of creative unity, of independence and of freedom.”

Jacques Maritain

Scholasticism and Politics (1940)

“Thus society is born, as something required by nature, and (because this nature is human nature) as something accomplished through a work of reason and will, and freely consented to. Man is a political animal, which means that the human person craves political life, communal life, not only with regard to the family community, but with regard to the civil community.”

Jacques Maritain

The Rights of Man (1945). London: Geoffrey Bles, pp. 7–8.

“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

True Humanism (1938), p. xv.

“The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge.”

Jacques Maritain

Theonas: Conversations of a Sage (1921). Sheed & Ward, 1933, p. 77.

“To philosophize man must put his whole soul into play, in much the same manner that to run he must use his heart and lungs.”

Jacques Maritain

An Essay on Christian Philosophy (1955), p. 17.

“There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism.”

Jacques Maritain

True Humanism (1938), p. xi.