Quotes About Saint Thomas Aquinas

Senior came to learn that the Catholic Church respected the integrity and the goodness of the created order, and that her teachers would say, with Saint Thomas Aquinas, that the grace of God perfects nature rather than supplants it, and that all of our knowledge, including what we know about God himself, comes to us first through the senses.

In his Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas Aquinas said, "To love is to will the good of the other."10 The modern philosopher Michael Novak refines this further by adding two words: "To love is to will the good of the other as other" (emphasis mine).11 He continues: "Love is not sentimental, nor restful in illusions, but watchful, alert, and ready to follow evidence. It seeks the real as lungs crave air.

In 1210, it issued its first condemnation of Averroës and his disciples in the West; for good measure, it extended the ban to the works of Aristotle. It was already too late. Just fifteen years after the ban was issued, Aristotle's greatest medieval expositor was born. To his family and neighbors, he was Tommaso D'Aquino. To history, he is Saint Thomas Aquinas, the single greatest creative mind of the Middle Ages.

Concerning perfect blessedness which consists in a vision of God.

Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God.

Umberto Eco's first published book was the dissertation he wrote at the University of Turin, on problems of aesthetics in the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks that "love is born of an earnest consideration of the object loved." And: "Love follows knowledge."3 Love is an emotional response aroused in the will by visions of the good. Contrary to what is often said, love is never blind, though it may not see rightly. It cannot exist without some vision of the beloved.

In The Prince he says that "a just war is a necessary war," thus cutting through the Gordian knot formed by endless Medieval discussions of Just War from Saint Augustine to Saint Thomas Aquinas.