Thomas Aquinas Quotes
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Affirmative precepts are distinguished from negative whenever one is not comprised in the other; thus, that of honoring parents does not comprise that of not killing, and vice versa.
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Here 'neath veils, my Saviour darkly I behold; To my thirsting spirit all thy light unfold; Face to face in heaven let me come to thee, And the blessed vision of thy glory see.
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It would seem that zeal is not an effect of love. For zeal is a beginning of contention.
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Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.
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You change people by delight, by pleasure.
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For although the will cannot be inwardly moved by any creature, yet it can be moved inwardly by God.
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Even as in the blessed in heaven there will be most perfect charity, so in the damned there will be the most perfect hate. Wherefore as the saints will rejoice in all goods, so will the damned grieve for all goods. Consequently the sight of the happiness of the saints will give them very great pain.
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An act of love always tends towards two things; to the good that one wills, and to the person for whom one wills it.
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To love God is something greater than to know Him.
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In the end, we know God as unknown.
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Evil denotes the lack of good. Not every absence of good is an evil, for absence may be taken either in a purely negative or in aprivative sense. Mere negation does not display the character of evil, otherwise nonexistents would be evil and moreover, a thing would be evil for not possessing the goodness of something else, which would mean that man is bad for not having the strength of a lion or the speed of a wild goat. But what is evil is privation; in this sense blindness means the privation of sight.
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Just as a man cannot live in the flesh unless he is born in the flesh, even so a man cannot have the spiritual life of grace unless he is born again spiritually. This regeneration is effected by Baptism: "Unless a man is born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God" (Jn 3:5)
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Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
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Given the sin of impiety through which they the Romans sinned against the divine nature by idolatry, the punishment that led them to sin against their own nature followed.... I say, therefore, that since they changed into lies by idolatry the truth about God, He brought them to ignominious passions, that is, to sins against nature; not that God led them to evil, but only that he abandoned them to evil.
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Good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good.
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To virginity is awarded the tribute of the highest beauty.
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For loving draws us more to things than knowing does, since good is found by going to the thing, whereas the true is found when the thing comes to us.
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For just as the first general precepts of the law of nature are self-evident to one in possession of natural reason, and have no need of promulgation, so also that of believing in God is primary and self-evident to one who has faith: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is.
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One day when Thomas Aquinas was preaching to the local populace on the love of God, he saw an old woman listening attentively to his every word. And inspired by her eagerness to learn more about her God whom she loved so dearly, he said to the people: It is better to be this unlearned woman, loving God with all her heart, than the most learned theologian lacking love.
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All that is true, by whomsoever it has been said has its origin in the Spirit.
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For in order that man may do well, whether in the works of the active life, or in those of the contemplative life, he needs the fellowship of friends.
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We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.
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Now it seems that everything in the world stems from sources other than God, since the products of nature have their source in nature; deliberate effects can be traced back to human reason or will as their source. There is no need then to assume that God exists.
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Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious.