404 Quotes by Thomas Aquinas

No man truly has joy unless he lives in love.

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.

Distinctions drawn by the mind are not necessarily equivalent to distinctions in reality.

Grace does not destroy nature, it perfects it.

A man does not always choose what his guardian angel intends.

To convert somebody go and take them by the hand and guide them.

Humility is the mark of a genuine disciple.

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.

We ought to cherish the body. Our body's substance is not from an evil principle, as the Manicheans imagine, but from God. And therefore, we ought to cherish the body by the friendship of love, by which we love God.