Jacques Maritain Quotes on Nature
Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher and one of the architects of the twentieth-century revival of Thomism. This page collects quotes attributed to Jacques Maritain on the topic of nature, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Jacques Maritain:
“There is one human nature, common to all the diverse cultures of mankind.”
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“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.”
Scholasticism and Politics (1940) -
“The Rights of Man and Natural Law (1943), p. 2.”
In each of us there dwells a mystery, and that mystery is the human personality. -
“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.”
The Rights of Man (1945). London: Geoffrey Bles, pp. 7–8.