Quotes & Sayings About St Thomas More

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

All good things vanish in less than a day, Peace, plenty, pleasure, suddenly decay Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year, The earth is hell when you leav'st to appear. — Thomas Nash

Reason is His voice, His interior prophet, in our souls. We call that prophet conscience. (St. Thomas used two terms for it: "synderesis" was the awareness of its reality and truth and authority and rules, and "conscience" was the application of it. We use "conscience" for both.) Conscience is essentially the power of reason to know good and evil. — Peter Kreeft

As someone who has spent many years marveling at the brilliant and painstaking work of the doctors, scientists and researchers at St. Jude, I can attest firsthand to the bone-deep commitment these men and women have made in their fight against disease. They are at it around the clock - every hour of the day, every day of the year. — Marlo Thomas

This book is dedicated to Thomas Coleman, a retired longshoreman, who died in his attic at 2214 St. Roch Avenue in New Orleans' 8th Ward on or about August 29, 2005. He had a can of juice and a bedspread at his side when the waters rose. There were more than a thousand like him. — Chris Rose

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

Fair summer droops, droop men and beasts therefore: So fair a summer look for never more. All good things vanish, less than in a day, Peace, plenty, pleasure, suddenly decay. Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year; The earth is hell when thou leav'st to appear. — Thomas Nashe

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

I am extremely grateful for two big gifts from my father. First, my sense of humor - the ability to see the humor in something while it is happening. That has cushioned my life. I am also grateful for the work of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. It has enriched my life and made me a very different person. — Marlo Thomas

They'd reached St Thomas's and climbed the half-dozen wooden steps to the small veranda. Gamache — Louise Penny

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

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

Everyone seems to agree that it is Minnesotans' responsibility to assimilate to Somali culture, not the other way around.11 The Catholic University of St. Thomas has installed Islamic prayer rooms and footbaths in order to demonstrate, according to Dean of Students Karen Lange, that the school is "diverse." Minneapolis's mayor, Betsy Hodges, has shown up wearing a full hijab to meetings with Somalis. (In fairness, it was "Forbid Your Daughter to Work Outside the Home" Day.) — Ann Coulter

I was thinking back to my own childhood in Ethiopia. The church services of our small Christian Indian community were interminable and conducted in an ancient language, Syriac. My parents and the other Indian Christians in Ethiopia knew the liturgy by heart, it was what they had grown up with. And to stand together in an Ethiopian church that they rented, to worship together in a language that could be traced to St. Thomas and to Jerusalem, was an affirmation of who they were, a connection to a corner of India so far away from Africa. — Abraham Verghese

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

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

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

You think nuts don't apply to the FBI? We get 'em all the time. A man in a Moe hairpiece applied in St. Louis last week. He had a bazooka, two rockets, and a bearskin shako in his golf bag." "Did you hire him? — Thomas Harris

Sir Thomas More was a victim of injustice and irony. Generously and meekly, just as he was about to be martyred, he said:
Paul ... was present, and consented to the death of St. Stephen, and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they [Stephen and Paul] now both twain Holy Saints in heaven, and shall continue there friends for ever, so I verily trust and ... pray, that though your lordships have now here in earth been judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in heaven merrily all meet together, to our everlasting salvation. — Neal A. Maxwell

You will have noticed by this time, of course, that St. Thomas almost always solves a dilemma by making a distinction. That is not a quirk of his personality or even of his method, but a reflection of the nature of reality. Reality is complex: it has many dimensions, "there are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your [always-simplistic and abstracted] philosophy" (Hamlet). This is the source of nearly all dilemmas and apparent contradictions, and therefore the key to their resolution. — Peter Kreeft

Spontaneously to God should turn the soul, Like the magnetic needle to the pole; But what were that intrinsic virtue worth, Suppose some fellow, with more zeal than knowledge, Fresh from St. Andrew's College, Should nail the conscious needle to the north? — Thomas Hood

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

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

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

I was still without any formal spiritual direction, but I went frequently to confession, especially at St. Francis' Church, where the Friars were more inclined to give me advice than secular priests had been. And it was in one of the confessionals at St. Francis' that a good priest one day told me, very insistently: "Go to Communion every day, every day." By that time, I had already become a daily communicant, but his words comforted and strengthened me, and his emphasis made me glad. And indeed I had reason to be, for it was those daily Communions that were transforming my life almost visibly, from day to day. — Thomas Merton

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

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

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

St. Thomas would have agreed with Leon Bloy, who often wrote that in the end there is only one tragedy in life: not to have been a saint. — Peter Kreeft

No matter how much the original Rule of St. Francis has changed, I think his spirit and his inspiration are still the fundamental thing in Franciscan life. And it is an inspiration rooted in joy, because it is guided by the prudence and wisdom which are revealed only to the little ones - the glad wisdom of those who have had the grace and the madness to throw away everything in one uncompromising rush, and to walk around barefooted in the simple confidence that if they get into trouble, God will come and get them out of it again. — Thomas Merton

Elgar's first symphony is the musical equivalent of St Pancras Railway Station. — Thomas Beecham

How could this fatuous, emotional thing be without beginning and without end, the creator of all? I had taken the dead letter of Scripture at its very deadest, and it had killed me, according to the saying of St. Paul: "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life — Thomas Merton

Fear not, but trust in Providence, Wherever thou may'st be. — Thomas Haynes Bayly

BEL-IMPERIA: Oh let me go; for in my troubled eyes
Now may'st thou read that life in passion dies.
HORATIO: Oh stay a while, and I will die with thee;
So shalt thou yield, and yet have conquered me. — Thomas Kyd

Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing ... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas ... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new. — G.K. Chesterton

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

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

Triumphal arch, that fill'st the sky When storms prepare to part, I ask not proud Philosophy To teach me what thou art. — Thomas Campbell

When I walk into an Orthodox Church ... one is immediately aware that one has stepped into the presence of what St. Paul would call the whole family in heaven and earth. You have stepped into the precincts of heaven! — Thomas Howard

It is no good to tell an atheist that he is an atheist; or to charge a denier of immortality with the infamy of denying it; or to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he is wrong, by proving that he is wrong on somebody else's principles, but not on his own. After the great example of St. Thomas, the principle stands, or ought always to have stood established; that we must either not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on his grounds and not ours. — G.K. Chesterton

The message was clear for baby boomers everywhere: Kurt Cobain was not merely some rock 'n' roll icon who couldn't handle drugs. In ways that were important to recognize, he was every parent's child. — Kurt St. Thomas

I'm thinking about the cat dying, Dulcie and her knife against my throat, Mrs Irvin and her St Thomas bone ... But never my sister. A brother rarely thinks about his sister. — Louis Nowra

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

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

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

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

For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power. — Thomas Hobbes

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

If you want your sins to be "covered" by the Lord (Ps. 32.1), do not parade your virtues before others. God will treat our sins the same way that we treat our virtues. St. Mark the Ascetic — Thomas Mitrakos