St Thomas Aquinas Quotes

There is nothing to unify God and the soul but the Cross. ~ Louis De Wohl

University of Chicago is a Baptist school, where atheist professors teach Jewish students about St. Thomas Aquinas. ~ Martin Gardner

For St. Thomas Aquinas the problem was rather different. It was a question of how to integrate philosophy into sacred science, not only without allowing either the one or the other to suffer essentially thereby, but to the greater benefit of both. In order to achieve this result, he had to integrate a science of reason with a science of revelation without corrupting at the same time both the purity of reason and the purity of revelation. ~ Etienne Gilson

A judgment is conscious of its own validity. This shows that the measure of validity to which it refers itself in this consciousness is inherent in the nature of judgment: a judgment is subject to this measure not in virtue of any circumstance in which it may find itself, but simply as judgment. Now when we think of an act simply as a judgment, we refer it to the power as an act of which it is a judgment: the power of judgment. Hence, the measure of validity of judgment is nothing other than the power of judgment. A judgment, being conscious of its validity, refers itself to the power from which it springs (as, e.g., St. Thomas Aquinas observes). ~ Sebastian Rödl

It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). ~ Sam Harris

But I don't want to just believe it, I want it to be true. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

The fact that the descent of the Quran led not only to the foundation of one of the world's great civilizations, but also to the creation of one of the major scientific, philosophical, and artistic traditions in global history was not accidental. Without the advent of the Quran, there would have been no Islamic sciences as we know them, sciences that were brought later to the West and we therefore would not have words such as "algebra," "algorithm," and many other scientific terms of Arabic origin in English. Nor would there be the Summas of St. Thomas Aquinas, at least in their existing form, since these Summas contain so many ideas drawn from Islamic sources. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

But in this life on earth we have not only the fear but the certainty that we shall lose it. For one day we must die. Therefore true happiness... lasting, everlasting happiness cannot be our lot on earth. Nor could it be otherwise. For everlasting happiness is only another name for God. ~ Louis De Wohl

If you want to be saved look at the face of your Christ. ~ St. Thomas Aquinas

Tell me, son... have you ever been intimidated by anyone?'
'Oh yes,' said Thomas.
'I don't believe it. By whom?'
'By Our Lord... on the altar. ~ Louis De Wohl

If grass grows and withers, it can only mean that it is part of a greater thing, which is even more real; not that the grass is less real than it looks. St. Thomas (Aquinas) has a really logical right to say, in the words of the modern mystic, A. E.: I begin by the grass to be bound again to the Lord. ~ G.K. Chesterton

St. Thomas Aquinas taught that water has been a natural sacrament since the dawn of creation. In the age of nature - from Adam through the patriarchs - water refreshed and cleansed humankind. ~ Scott Hahn

St. Thomas Aquinas, she knew, was reputed to say that he feared the man who had just one book, and she understood what he meant about the narrowness of outlook that could give. However, she thought, perhaps a man with one well-loved book might be a more rounded individual than the man who possessed hundreds and never opened any of them. ~ Cora Harrison

The first-cause and prime-mover argument, brilliantly proffered by St. Thomas Aquinas in the fourteenth century (and brilliantly refuted by David Hume in the eighteenth century), is easily turned aside with just one more question: Who or what caused and moved God? ~ Michael Shermer

My Dear Lord, please help me. Place me in the Center of Your Perfect Will.
Adoro te devote, latens Deitas.
Bread of Life by bread concealed, speaking heart to heart.
Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit.
Let Your presence draw me in here my senses fail.
Visus cactus, gustus in te falliti.
This is truth enough for me.
Peto quod petivit latro paenitens.
Seeing You upon the Cross, flesh and blood, I find.
Plagas, sicut Thomas, non intueor.
I see not but name You still God and Prince of Life.
O memoriale mortis Domini.
How I thirst to meet Your gaze gloriously revealed. After life's obscurity, let me wake to see. Beauty shining from Your Face for eternity.
Amen. ~ Gina Marinello-Sweeney

To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Leave to every one the care of what belongs to him, and disturb not thyself with what is said or done in the world. - ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. ~ Various

BEDE. (ubi sup.) Repent, therefore, and believe; that is, renounce dead works; for of what use is believing without good works? The merit of good works does not, however, bring to faith, but faith begins, that good works may follow. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Hence it is predicated chiefly of the virtuous; then of the pleasant; and lastly of the useful. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Reason in man is rather like God in the world. ~ Thomas Aquinas

In the realm of evil thoughts none induces to sin as much as do thoughts that concern the pleasure of the flesh. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Give, expecting nothing there of. ~ Thomas Aquinas

"The Jews should not be allowed to keep what they have obtained from others by usury; it were best that they were compelled to worked so that they could earn their living instead of doing nothing but becoming avaricious." ~ Thomas Aquinas

I grew up and left home for college in the Twin Cities at a school called St. Thomas, ~ Cheryl Strayed

The human mind may perceive truth only through thinking, as is clear from Augustine. ~ Thomas Aquinas

After all, what is your personal identity? It is what you really are, your real self. None of us is what he thinks he is, or what other people think he is, still less what his passport says he is And it is fortunate for most of us that we are mistaken. We do not generally know what is good for us. That is because, in St. Bernard's language, our true personality has been concealed under the 'disguise' of a false self, the ego, whom we tend to worship in place of God. ~ Thomas Merton

Justice is a certain rectitude of mind whereby a man does what he ought to do in the circumstances confronting him. ~ Thomas Aquinas

The same fire" (which he decides to be material) " torments the damned in hell and the just in purgatory ... The least pain in purgatory exceeds the greatest in this life. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Today, all patients accepted for treatment at St. Jude's are treated without regard for the family's ability to pay. Everything beyond what is covered by insurance is taken care of, and for those without insurance, all of the medical costs are absorbed by the hospital. ~ Marlo Thomas

To be united to God in unity of person was not fitting to human flesh, according to its natural endowments, since it was above his dignity; nevertheless, it was fitting that God, by reason of his infinite goodness, should unite it to himself for human salvation. ~ Thomas Aquinas

The fire of hell is called eternal, only because it never ends. Still, there is change in the pains of the lost ... Hence in hell true eternity does not exist, but rather time. ~ Thomas Aquinas

An angel can illume the thought and mind of man by strengthening the power of vision. ~ Thomas Aquinas

To make peace either in oneself or among others, shows a man to be a follower of God, ~ Thomas Aquinas

True peace consists in not separating ourselves from the will of God. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Greed is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things, ~ Thomas Aquinas

A scrap of knowledge about sublime things is worth more than any amount about trivialities. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Anger and the like are attributed to God on account of a similitude of effect. Thus, because to punish is properly the act of an angry man, God's punishment is metaphorically spoken of as His anger. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace. ~ Thomas Aquinas

To love is to will the good of the other. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Humility is the mark of a genuine disciple. ~ Thomas Aquinas

There would not be a perfect likeness of God in the universe if all things were of one grade of being. ~ Thomas Aquinas

The external fact fertilizes the internal intelligence, as the bee fertilizes the flower. Anyhow, upon that marriage, or whatever it may be called, the whole system of St. Thomas is founded; God made Man so that he was capable of coming in contact with reality; and those whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder. ~ G.K. Chesterton

But the one counsel he did give me is something that I will not easily forget: There are many beautiful mystical books written by the Christians. You should read St. Augustine's Confessions, and The Imitation of Christ ~ Thomas Merton

To love God is something greater than to know Him. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called "great books." That, for instance, Mann's asinine "Death in Venice," or Pasternak's melodramatic, vilely written "Dr. Zhivago," or Faulkner's corn-cobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces" or at least what journalists term "great books," is to me the sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's "Ulysses"; Kafka's "Transformation"; Bely's "St. Petersburg," and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, "In Search of Lost Time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Art is right reason in the doing of work. ~ Thomas Aquinas

I find that balancing my life with my work with the kids at St. Jude, working on books, working on my career as an actor and taking time out for my husband and family help to cushion a lot of the blows. ~ Marlo Thomas

St. Thomas adopts a division of the nine choirs into three groups, according to their intellectual perfection and consequent nearness in being to God - Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominations, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, Angels. Other writers suggest different arrangements; and there is a mass of magnificent theological speculation as to the difference of function between one choir and another. But the Church has defined nothing upon this matter. ~ Frank Sheed

This Blood that but one drop of has the power to win all the world forgiveness of its world of sin. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Dylan Thomas was lying in a coma under an oxygen tent in St. Vincent's Hospital. He had been lying there, unshaven, for three days. The precise cause of the coma was obscure, though he had been heard making the extravagant claim that he had eighteen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern the night before he collapsed. ~ Katie Roiphe

Every cell in us worships God. ~ Thomas Aquinas

In commenting on the Stagirite, St. Thomas discards Averroistic interpretations contrary to revealed dogma, on Providence, on creation, on the personal immortality of the human soul. Hence it can be said that he "baptizes" Aristotle's teaching, that is, he shows how the principles of Aristotle, understood as they can be and must be understood, are in harmony with revelation. Thus he builds, step by step, the foundations of a solid Christian philosophy. ~ Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange

A song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Hence it is written (Wis. 9:14): "The thoughts of mortal men are fearful, and our counsels uncertain." Thus man needs to be guarded by the angels. Reply ~ Thomas Aquinas

Arrive at knowledge over small streamlets, and do not plunge immediately into the ocean, since progress must go from the easier to the more difficult. ~ Thomas Aquinas

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

The apostles and their successors are God's vicars in governing the Church which is built on faith and the sacraments of faith. Wherefore, just as they may not institute another Church, so neither may they deliver another faith, nor institute other sacraments. ~ Thomas Aquinas

In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign. Secondly, a just cause. Thirdly, a rightful intention. ~ Thomas Aquinas

For those with faith, no evidence is necessary; for those without it, no evidence will suffice. ~ Thomas Aquinas

It would be superfluous to receive by faith, things that can be known by natural reason ~ Thomas Aquinas

If God has the truth and if man has only an analogy, it follows that he does not have the truth. An analogy of the truth is not the truth; even if man's knowledge is not called an analogy of the truth but an analogical truth, the situation is no better. An analogical truth, except it contain a univocal point of coincident meaning, simply is not the truth at all. In particular (and the most crushing reply of all) if the human mind were limited to analogical truths, it could never know the univocal truth that it was limited to analogies. Even if it were true that the contents of human knowledge are analogies, a man could never know that such was the case; he could only have the analogy that his knowledge was analogical. This theory, therefore, whether found in Thomas Aquinas, Emil Brunner, or professed conservatives is unrelieved skepticism and is incompatible with the acceptance of a divine revelation of truth. ~ Anonymous

That which is asserted universally, by everyone, cannot possibly be totally false. For a false opinion is a kind of infirmity of the understanding, just as a false judgment concerning a proper sensible happens as the result of a weakness of the sense power involved. But defects, being outside the intention of nature, are accidental. And nothing accidental can be always and in all things; the judgment about savors given by every tasting cannot be false. Thus, the judgment uttered by everyone concerning truth cannot be erroneous. ~ Thomas Aquinas

If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever. ~ Thomas Aquinas

If there were some solitary or feral man, the passions of the soul would be sufficient for him; by them he would be conformed to things in order that he might have knowledge of them. But because man is naturally political and social, there is need for one man to make his conceptions known to others, which is done with speech. So significant speech was needed if men were to live together. Which is why those of different tongues do not easily live together. ~ Thomas Aquinas

Our manner of knowing is so weak that no philosopher could perfectly investigate the nature of even one little fly. ~ Thomas Aquinas