Thomas Aquinas Quotes

“Any time you feel the desire to eat a pint of Cherry Garcia ice cream, commit adultery,
avoid confessing your sins, or hate your boss, your concupiscible passions are stirring.”
― Taylor R. Marshall, Thomas Aquinas in 50 Pages: The Layman's Quick Guide to Thomism

“What has officially been declared as the basis of theological studies in the Roman Catholic Church has been enormously influenced by Islam and Muslim beliefs.

Funny old world, isn’t it?”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Must we choose Thomas or Newman in this unhealthy epoch, struggling as it is between integralism and modernism [...] No, the choice of this hour as we stand at the central point of the spiritual crisis of our time is not Thomas or Newman, but, true to the spirit of Catholic polarity, Thomas and Newman.”
― Erich Przywara

“Thomas Aquinas is but Aristotle sainted.”
― Joseph Glanvill, The vanity of dogmatizing: The three versions;

“But . . . but was evil an entity at all? What caused evil? Imperfection in activity . . . imperfection of matter.

It could not stand alone. It could not exist by itself. It had to use a pre-existing Good. It was an imperfection of the Good, a privation of the Good, a perversion of the Good. By itself? By itself . . . it was . . . nothing. By itself it had no being. It was *not* an entity.
. . .
Calmly Thomas began to dictate to Briancourt a sequence of thoughts which tore Evil from its throne of being an entity, a principle in its own right, and relegated it to the status of a parasite.”
― De Wohl, Louis

“I have pointed out that mere modern free-thought has left everything in a fog, including itself. The assertion that thought is free led first to the denial that will is free; but even about that there was no real determination among the Determinists. In practice, they told men that they must treat their will as free as though it was not free. In other words, Man must live a double life; which is exactly the old heresy of Tiger of Brabant about the Double Mind. In other words, the nineteenth century left everything in chaos; and the importance of Thomas to the twentieth century is that it may give us back a cosmos. We can give here only the rudest sketch of how Aquinas, like Agnostics, beginning in the cosmic cellars, yet climbed to the cosmic towers.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“Part of the problem with Dawkins’s criticisms of Aquinas, then (and of the other New Atheists’ criticisms of certain other religious arguments), is that they fail to understand the difference between a scientific hypothesis and an attempted metaphysical demonstration, and illegitimately judge the latter as if it were the former. Of course, they might respond by claiming that scientific reasoning, and maybe mathematical reasoning too, are the only legitimate kinds, and seek thereby to rule out metaphysical arguments from the get go. But there are two problems with this view (which is known as “scientism” or “positivism”). First, if they want to take this position, they’ll need to defend it and not simply assert it; otherwise they’ll be begging the question against their opponents and indulging in just the sort of dogmatism they claim to oppose. Second, the moment they attempt to defend it, they will have effectively refuted it, for scientism or positivism is itself a metaphysical position that could only be justified using metaphysical arguments.”
― Edward Feserser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“Thomas Aquinas (1225—1274) states that God is a simple being. Although God is eternal, a material world, Universe, is not eternal. For Aquinas, God’s existence is his essence, the basis of Divine simplicity. For anything else, there is a distinction between existence and essence. Aquinas defined his five arguments for the existence of God in his book Summa Theologica:

1. The First Way: Motion. (The argument from "first mover.")
2. The Second Way: Efficient Cause. (The argument from universal causation.)
3. The Third Way: Possibility and Necessity. (The argument from contingency).
4. The Fourth Way: Gradation. (The argument from degree.)
5. The Fifth Way: Design. (The argument from final cause or ends [Teleological argument].)”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE

“In the light of what Thomas Aquinas and Erasmus wrote it is amusing to find that Thomas himself became the butt of a jest which embodied what they both loathed. Thomas was silently composing a hymn in his mind while eating a lamprey. He finished hymn and lamprey together. To give thanks to God for his hymn he muttered one of Christ’s seven last words on the Cross, Consummatum est! — ‘It is finished!’ Bystanders were shocked. They thought he was lightly referring to the lamprey he had just consumed.”
― M.A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross

“Faith has to do with things that are not seen, and hope with things that are not at hand.”
― Thomas Aquinas, The "Summa Theologica" of Saint Thomas Aquinas: Treatise on the Trinity and Creation, XXVII-XLIX