14 Quotes by Étienne Gilson

The God of St. Thomas and Dante is a God Who loves, the god of Aristotle is a god who does not refuse to be loved; the love that moves the heavens and the stars in Aristotle is the love of the heavens and the stars for god, but the love that moves them in St. Thomas and Dante is the love of God for the world; between these two motive causes there is all the difference between an efficient cause on the one hand, and a final cause on the other.

History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.

It is not solely or chiefly in virtue of the divine image that man effectively resembles God, but in virtue of his consciousness of being an image and the movement whereby the soul, passing in a way through itself, avails itself of the factual resemblance in order to attain to God.

God creates, not that there may be witnesses to render Him His due glory, but beings who shall rejoice in it as He rejoices in it Himself and who, participating in His being, participate at the same time in His beatitude. It is not therefore for Himself, but for us, that God seeks His glory; it is not to gain it, for He posses it already, nor to increase it, for already it is perfect, but to communicate it to us.

There is more than one excuse for being a Descartes, but there is no excuse whatsoever for being a Cartesian

Pure sensism leads inevitably to universal doubt; if reality is in the end reducible to sensible appearance, then, since this is in a state of perpetual flux and self-contradiction, no kind of certitude will any longer be possible. [...] Truth is necessary and immutable; but in the sensible order nothing necessary or immutable is to be found; therefore sensible things will never yield us any truth.

He(E.A.Poe) cannot be blamed for not saying clearly what beauty is. The greatest philosophers in the world acknowledge in the end that the best one can do is to recognize it when it is there.

Philosophy always buries its undertakers.

Radiance belongs to being considered precisely as beautiful: it is, in being, that which catches the eye, or the ear, or the mind, and makes us want to perceive it again.