Thomas Aquinas Quotes
-
God has no need for our worship. It is we who need to show our gratitude for what we have received.
-
There is no leisure about politics.
-
Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace.
-
If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.
-
O saving Victim, opening wide The gate of heaven to man below, Our foes press on from every side, Thine aid supply, Thy strength bestow.
-
Far graver is it to corrupt the faith that is the life of the soul than to counterfeit the money that sustains temporal life.
-
All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.
-
The soul is perfected by knowledge and virtue.
-
The meaning of what is said is according to the motive for saying it: because things are not subject to speech, but speech to things. Therefore we should take account of the motive of the lawgiver, rather than of his very words.
-
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.
-
Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.
-
Devotion is a certain act of the will by which man gives himself promptly to divine service.
-
Moral science is better occupied when treating of friendship than of justice.
-
Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution; justice without mercy is cruelty.
-
To live well is to work well, to show a good activity.
-
Reasoning is compared to understanding as movement is to rest, or acquisition to possession.... Since movement always proceeds from something immovable, and ends in something at rest, hence it is that human reasoning, in the order of inquiry and discovery, proceeds from certain things absolutely understood--namely, the first principles; and, again, in the order of judgment, returns by analysis to first principles, in the light of which it examines what it has found. Now it is clear that rest and movement are not to be referred to different powers, but to one and the same.
-
All my words are but chaff next to the faith of a simple man.
-
There must be must be a first mover existing above all – and this we call God.
-
The soul, which is the first principle of life, is not a body, but the act of a body; just as heat, which is the principle of calefaction, is not a body, but an act of a body.
-
Just as in a physical body the operation of one member contributes to the good of the whole body, so it is in a spiritual body such as the Church. And since all the faithful are one body, the good of one member is communicated to another; everyone members, as the Apostle says, of one another. For that reason, among the points of faith handed down by the Apostles, is that there is a community of goods in the Church, and this is expressed in the words Communion of Saints.
-
Do not wish to jump immediately from the streams to the sea, because one has to go through easier things to the more difficult.
-
A song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.
-
Thus Angels' Bread is made The Bread of man today: The Living Bread from Heaven With figures doth away: O wondrous gift indeed! The poor and lowly may Upon their Lord and Master feed.
-
How can we live in harmony? First we need to know we are all madly in love with the same God.