Many / One

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Compiled by JoAnn Kite

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An Introduction to Philosophy
Jacques Maritain
"This book remains an important work in our time because it tells us something of the perennial philosophy - something that must remain vibrant and remembered if it is to be truly perennial." - from the Foreword

1 "Gentleness and pity, when they are not regulated by reason and dictated by love, can deform human nature as much as violence, since they are then manifestations of cowardice, not of charity."

2 "The great truths without which man's moral life is impossible – for example, knowledge of God's existence, the freedom of the will, etc. – belong to the domain of common sense, as consequences immediately deducible (proximate conclusions) from primary data apprehended by observation and first principles apprehended by the intellect. All people, unless spoiled by a faulty education or by some intellectual vice, possess a natural certainty of these truths."

3 "No creature is evil by nature."

4 "Pythagoras appears to have taught the unity of God, whom he regarded as one omnipresent Spirit from whom our spirits emanated."

5 "There is present in all objects and in the universe as a whole a hidden principle of measure and harmony."

6 "In spite of the changes which it underwent, the primitive tradition has preserved for mankind throughout the ages a deposit..of fundamental truths."

7 "Plato arrived at the conclusion that there exists in a supra-sensible world a host of models or archetypes, immaterial, immutable, eternal, man in general or man in himself, triangle in itself, virtue in itself, etc. These he termed ideas, which are the object apprehended by the intellect, the faculty which attains truth – that is to say, they are Reality."

8 "Life belongs to God: for the act of thought is life, and God is that act; and God's essential act is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal and perfect, so that life which endures everlastingly belongs to God, for God is this life." Aristotle, 'Metaphysics', xii, 7, 1072 b; 9, 1074 b 35

9 "God is the sole supreme principle and the source of everything which exists."

This body of quotes compiled by JoAnn Kite