Saint Thomas Quotes

To convert somebody go and take them by the hand and guide them. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Saints spring and thrive most internally, when they are most externally afflicted. Afflictions are the mother of virtue. ~ Thomas Brooks

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. ~ Martin Luther

Back in Georgie's attic, he yanks the phone out of the socket and begins scrolling down the names under dialed calls, praying to anyone who will listen. God. Baby Jesus. Saint Thomas the doubter. Saint Whoever, patron saint of losers. Praying, Please, please, don't let it be true.
The first name shatters him.
The second makes his head spin. ~ Melina Marchetta

Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), also known as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, author, and statesman. During his lifetime he earned a reputation as a leading humanist scholar and occupied many public offices, including that of Lord Chancellor from 1529 to 1532. More coined the word "utopia", a name he gave to an ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in a book published in 1516. He is chiefly remembered for his principled refusal to accept King Henry VIII's claim to be supreme head of the Church of England, a decision which ended his political career and led to his execution as a traitor. In 1935, four hundred years after his death, More was canonized in the Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI, and was later declared the patron saint of lawyers and statesmen. He shares his feast day, June 22 on the Catholic calendar of saints, with Saint John Fisher, the only Bishop during the English Reformation to maintain his allegiance to the Pope. More was added to the Anglican Churches' calendar of saints in 1980. Source: Wikipedia ~ Thomas More

Oh, Buenos Aires, I have traveled around the world, but I've never been separated from you," said Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges. And Saint Thomas said, "A friendship that can end has never been a true friendship." In ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

Take care,' said Delaura. 'Sometimes we attribute certain things we do not understand to the demon, not thinking they may be things of God that we do not understand.'
'Saint Thomas said it, and I will be guided by him,' said the Abbess: 'One must not believe demons even when they speak the truth. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It is the saints who know what being in love is all about. Earthly love pales by comparison. ~ Thomas Dubay

I loved Enso Roshi's teachings. I loved learning about life. I loved life. It was a good thing to feel. I loved life, and I loved learning, and I was still learning. I was not, yet, done. At the end of our journeys, there would be an end to the journey. Maybe. If I was lucky. If providence shone down upon me gently. I would find love. I would find acceptance. Complete love. Complete acceptance. I would know, that the self, is an illusion. I would come to enlightenment, but that would also mean, there would be no 'I' there. I would realize that the 'I' was an illusion, all along, just like some great dream. This is what the wise sages say, the great teachings, the mystical teachings, not only from the East, but also from the West. The Gospel of Saint Thomas. Thomas Merton. Thomas, like I was Thomas, and also doubting, the main reasons I'd chosen the name. If nothing else, it was lovable, just as it is. My life. Even the parts I didn't love, could I love them? The struggles. It was all part of the journey, and would I not look back fondly on this, at some time? Look at how arduous and sincere I'd been. Look at how worried I'd been. Look at how insecure I'd been. Look at how I'd struggled. Trying to find my way. Would I not look back upon myself, affectionately and fondly and with love? ~ T. Scott McLeod

Saint Thomas Aquinas explains how, with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, a person's whole spiritual being becomes responsive to God's light, not only the light of knowledge but also the inspiration of love. I have prayed for the gifts of the Holy Spirit since my youth and I continue to do so. ~ Pope John Paul II

Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you.
If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you ~ Saint Thomas The Apostle

Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God. ~ Henry Adams

We can't have full knowledge all at once. We must start by believing; then afterwards we may be led on to master the evidence for ourselves. ~ Thomas Aquinas

If someone knows from experience that daily Communion increases fervor without lessening reverence, then let him go every day. But if someone finds that reverence is lessened and devotion not much increased, then let him sometimes abstain, so as to draw near afterwards with better dispositions. ~ Thomas Aquinas

What do you want to want to be, anyway?"
"I don't know; I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic."
"What you should say"
he told me
"what you should say is that you want to be a saint. ~ Thomas Merton

No more cutting grams, and wrapping grands up in rubber-bands,
I'm a recovered man, our plans ta discover other lands,
suburban places got me seeking for an oasis, cristal by the cases, ladies of all races with dime faces, sex on the white sand beaches of Saint Thomas, though this ain't promised,
I'm as determined as them old timers. ~ Eminem

Ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce 'proofs' of immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors - Saint Thomas rejected Saint Anselm's proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes' - but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deepseated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions. ~ Bertrand Russell

Saint Thomas declared that woman was an "inessential" being, which, from a masculine point of view, is a way of positing the accidental character of sexuality. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

Sympathy is the first great lesson which man should learn. It will be ill for him if he proceeds no farther; if his emotions are but excited to roll back on his heart, and to be fostered in luxurious quiet. But unless he learns to feel for things in which he has no personal interest, he can achieve nothing generous or noble. ~ Thomas Noon Talfourd

What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

Fall in love with the process, and the results will come. ~ Eric Thomas

Thomas Jefferson taught that a democracy was impractical unless the people were educated. ~ Carl Sagan

The connection between vice and meanness is a fit subject for satire, but when the satire is a fact, it cuts with the irresistible power of a diamond. ~ Thomas Paine

Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism. ~ Thomas Mann

Any policy is a success by sufficiently low standards and a failure by sufficiently high standards. ~ Thomas Sowell

As for gun control advocates, I have no hope whatever that any facts whatever will make the slightest dent in their thinking - or lack of thinking. ~ Thomas Sowell

The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. ("The Medusa") ~ Thomas Ligotti

Age gives you an excuse for not being very good at things that you were not very good at when you were young. ~ Thomas Sowell

It is not earthly riches which make us or our sons happy; for they must either be lost by us in our lifetime, or be possessed when we are dead, by whom we know not, or perhaps by whom we would not. ~ Saint Augustine

The bad news (or good news, depending on your point of view) is that things have always been like this. ~ Thomas Piketty

The secrets I've kept from her are unforgivable. ~ Kara Thomas

Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about ordinary language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded. ~ Thomas Nagel

I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected ~ Thomas Merton

The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude. ~ Thomas Merton

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget. ~ Thomas Szasz

Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvellous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified. ~ Thomas Henry Huxley

Your decisions are the A.I.R. (Action, Impact, and Result) or the breath of life you take each day to live. Each decision is made from your action, the impact of the action, and the results of that action. ~ Thomas Narofsky

You're gonna need a lot more than prayers, kid. ~ Ashlan Thomas

The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places. ~ Thomas Merton

I find men's clothing fascinating because sometime between, say, 1930 and 1936 a handful of basic shapes were created and still prevail as a sort of scale of expression, with which every man can project his own personality and his own dignity. ~ Yves Saint-Laurent

The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time. ~ Thomas Jefferson

To the corruptions of christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Later they went outside, where a light rain was blowing in, mixed with salt spray feathering off the surf. Shasta wandered slowly down to the beach and through the wet sand, her nape in a curve she had learned, from times when back-turning came into it, the charm of. Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool's attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did. The surf, only now and then visible, was hammering at his spirit, knocking things loose, some to fall into the dark and be lost forever, some to edge into the fitful light of his attention whether he wanted to see them or not. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Failure is a big part of a free market's success. People fail to live up to their potential, or to carry out all their good intentions, in all kinds of economic and political systems. Capitalism makes them pay a price for their failures, while socialism, feudalism, fascism and other systems enable personal failures, especially by those at the top, to be ignored. ~ Thomas Sowell

Oh, how swiftly the glory of the world passes away! ~ Thomas A Kempis

When men cease to be faithful to their God, he who expects to find them so to each other will be much disappointed. ~ Thomas Hartwell Horne

Should my decease happen in Newcastle I desire that my remains may be laid near the south porch in Saint Andrews churchyard near the remains of my dear wife, and that the least possible expence may be laid out on my interment. Charles Avison ~ Charles Avison

Long gone is the time when we [blacks] opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. Somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and demand conformity to that norm ... [However], I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black. ~ Clarence Thomas

And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall. ~ Thomas Mann

The only unhappiness is not to love God. ~ Thomas Merton

Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters gold. ~ Thomas Gray

Outwardly, other than her hair, she had not changed much. She was still more or less the same cool, aloof woman who garnered more respect than affection. On the inside, however, it had been impossible to return to the person she used to be. ~ Sherry Thomas

You must teach a horse that you are the master, but you must always show yourself to be a very kind master. ~ Thomas Nye

The judge punishes lawbreakers as a burning house injures its occupants. A person may be burned to death while robbing a home or saving a friend. Similarly, from a moral point of view, the judge's work is good or evil, depending on whether the laws he enforces are good or evil. ~ Thomas Szasz

If you believe that God overrules all things for good, and only permits apparently evil happenings for good and the achievement of great ends unbeknown to you, then all is well. All is well because you believe in the sovereignty of God. ~ Henry Thomas Hamblin

If you hear screaming, it's my meltdown. Do me a favor and make sure I stay dressed."
Those hazel eyes took their sweet time taking in every inch of my body. "I make no promises. ~ Ashlan Thomas

Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles; he can only discover them; and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author. ~ Thomas Paine

The greatest difficulty we have faced is the neocolonial way of thinking that exists in this country. We were colonized by a country, France, that left us with certain habits. For us, being successful in life, being happy, meant trying to live as they do in France, like the richest of the French. ~ Thomas Sankara

The hero is a secret agent? Well, who gives a crap about the rest of his case once he has met the heroine. Time for moody angst! ~ Sherry Thomas

Anything for a quiet life. ~ Thomas Middleton

Five feet. Four feet. Three. Two. Thomas knew he had no choice. He moved. Forward. He squeezed past the connecting rods at the last second and stepped into the Maze. The walls slammed shut behind him, the echo of its boom bouncing off the ivy-covered stone like mad laughter. ~ James Dashner

All this reverential - I'm not a saint." Ma's voice is getting loud again. "I wish people would stop treating us like we're the only ones who ever lived through something terrible. I've been finding stuff on the Internet you wouldn't believe. ~ Emma Donoghue

O what a heaven is love! O what a hell! ~ Thomas Dekker