St Aquinas Quotes & Sayings

No one is dumb who is curious. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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

Republicans don't want anyone having more fun than they do, and the Democrats don't want anyone making more money than they do. Libertarians want you to make money and have fun. — Andre Marrou

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

St. Thomas Aquinas deeply loved this beautiful chant thus understood. It is told of him that he could not keep back his tears when, during Compline of Lent, he chanted the antiphon: "In the midst of life we are in death: whom do we seek as our helper, but Thou, O Lord, who because of our sins art rightly incensed? Holy God, strong God, holy and merciful Savior, deliver us not up to a bitter death; abandon us not in the time of our old age, when our strength will abandon us." This beautiful antiphon begs for the grace of final perseverance, the grace of graces, that of the predestined. How it should speak to the heart of the contemplative theologian, who has made a deep study of the tracts on Providence, predestination, and grace! — Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange

To love is to will the good of another. — St. Thomas Aquinas

But a dauntless faith believes — Thomas Aquinas

The 'words' of Augustine, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, St. John of Damascus, St. Thomas Aquinas, et al, may not have carried the weight of Canon, however they were neither paper-like nor mere 'pellets'."

~R. Alan Woods [2012] — R. Alan Woods

The happy life does not mean loving what we possess, but possessing what we love. Possession of the beloved, St. Thomas holds, takes place in an act of cognition, in seeing, in intuition, in contemplation. — Josef Pieper

To the degree that each part of our life will support and complement every other and all are ordered to our ultimate goal, our lives will be beautiful. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the essential attributes of beauty is due proportion, which means that all parts are in harmony with each other. Another attribute of beauty is integrity, which means that the overall purpose of the thing is in harmony with what it is meant to be, which for the Christian is the love of God. The final attribute is clarity - it must be radiant and perceptible by others. When people see a life well lived, they are drawn by its beauty and then beyond to the source to which it points, and to which that life is ordered: God. — David Clayton

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

You know," Cecily said, "you really didn't have to throw that man through the window. — Cassandra Clare

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

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

Today I believe that man cannot escape his destiny to create whatever it is we make - jazz, a wooden spoon, or graffiti on the wall. All of these are expressions of man's creativity, proof that man has not yet been destroyed by technology. But are we making things for the people of our epoch or repeating what has been done before? And finally, is the question itself important? We must ask ourselves that. The most important thing is always to doubt the importance of the question. — Orson Welles

It takes no more intellectual effort than that exercised in choosing a pair of socks, or slicing a piece of cheesecake, to understand that the Dominican friar, St. Thomas Aquinas, was emphatically, hopelessly wrong. It was not goodness that spilled out into the world, shaping that which had no shape, bonum diffusivum sui, but a spectacular weave of perversion born of a simple but ultimately irresistible compulsion to explore and experience through evolving proxies that single thing an uncreated aseitic being - God - could never alone explore or ever directly experience: death, and all the exotic abstractions associated to it. — John Zande

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

The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being - that is, in terms of concrete stage images. This is the difference between the approach of the philosopher and that of the poet; the difference, to take an example from another sphere, between the idea of God in the works of Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza and the intuition of God in those of St. John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart - the difference between theory and experience. — Martin Esslin

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.

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

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

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

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

Many have emphasized that our ability to reason is the distinguishing mark of the soul. Others have argued that our ability to communicate sets us apart. Still others have stressed that our ability to love or to sense God or to make moral judgments manifests our imago Dei. Many theologians have concluded that all of these features manifest the soul. In each case, however, the divine image is located in the soul of humans. St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin are classic representatives of this perspective. A — Gregory A. Boyd

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

One faith, St. Paul writes (Eph. 4:5). Hold most firmly that our faith is identical with that of the ancients. Deny this, and you dissolve the unity of the Church ... We must hold this for certain, namely: that the faith of the people at the present day is one with the faith of the people in past centuries. Were this not true, then we would be in a different church than they were in and, literally, the Church would not be One. — Thomas Aquinas

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

Our fears are groomed for us and implanted within us by others who did the same for themselves... — Craig D. Lounsbrough

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

Previously, Incledon was the head strength and conditioning specialist at Cypress Bay School and St. Thomas Aquinas School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (where she was also the head athletic trainer). She initiated the strength and conditioning program for the then-new Cypress Bay, and during her time at St. — Lori Incledon

St. Thomas Aquinas understood virtues to be habitual or abiding dispositions that help us to realize the good in our decisions and actions. These habitual dispositions, acquired through repetition and an effort over time (and, at the same time, given to us by God through grace), make accomplishing the good easier, more immediate, requiring less internal deliberation and struggle. — Mark O'Keefe

The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them — St. Thomas Aquinas

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

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