I was digging through some archived bits looking for the progenitor of a story currently bubbling up through my grey and came across a place where I had jotted down this:

"Bread for myself is a material question, but bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one." -- Jacques Maritan

I don't know where I came across it, though I'd put money it was an article by Chris Hedges, as I am not otherwise at all familiar with Mr. Maritan.

Curious about him, I Wikied him, then went looking for other of his quotes for a quick sense of what words of his had landed in the hearts of the world.

I wouldn't normally do this, at least not without digging a bit deeper into things myself, but I found myself sparked by some of what I found, so I'm going to put them here for now:

• Let us not go faster than God. It is our emptiness and our thirst that He needs, not our plentitude.

• God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

• To redeem creation the saint wages war on the entire fabric of creation, with the bare weapons of truth and love.

• We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve

• The first step to be taken by everyone who wishes to act morally is to decide not to act according to the general customs and doings of his fellow-men.

• God's love causes the beauty of what He loves, our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.

• Every work of art reaches man in his inner powers. It reaches him more profoundly and insidiously than any rational proposition, either cogent demonstration or sophistry. For it strikes him with two terrible weapons, Intuition and Beauty, and at the single root in him of all his energies... Art and Poetry awaken the dreams of man, and his longings, and reveal to him some of the abysses he has in himself.

• We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities.

• A man of courage flees forward, in the midst of new things.

• The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.