Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Maritain

Courage, Maritain suggests, isn’t the swaggering refusal to retreat; it’s the decision to run headlong into uncertainty and call it duty. “Flees forward” is a deliberately jarring phrase: flight implies fear, even self-preservation, yet it’s welded to forward motion, the direction we usually reserve for heroism. The line smuggles in a psychological truth that a lot of moral language hides: the brave aren’t fearless. They’re frightened people who choose a productive direction for their fear.

The kicker is “in the midst of new things.” Maritain, a Catholic philosopher writing through the tremors of modernity and the political catastrophes of the early 20th century, knew the modern world specialized in novelty that felt like vertigo: new ideologies, new technologies, new wars, new social arrangements. The temptation in that environment is nostalgia as a hiding place, or cynicism as a pose. His formulation denies both. It reframes novelty as the very arena where courage proves itself, not an excuse to cling to the old.

There’s also an ethic tucked inside the grammar. To “flee forward” is not to dominate circumstances but to accept being chased by them, then to keep moving anyway. It’s a spiritual posture as much as a practical one: faith not as certainty, but as motion under pressure. Maritain makes courage less about control than about consent to change without surrendering one’s moral compass.