{"author":"Thomas Aquinas","author_id":"Thomas+Aquinas","total_quotes":59,"quotes":[{"text":"If, then, you are looking for the way by which you should go, take Christ, because He Himself is the way.","author":"Thomas Aquinas","tags":["looking","way","you "],"id":8890,"author_id":"Thomas+Aquinas"},{"text":"God is not, like creatures, made up of parts. God is spirit, without bodily dimensions. Firstly, no body can cause change without itself being changed. Secondly, things with dimensions are potential of division. But the starting-point for all existence must be wholly real and not potential in any way: though things that get realized begin as potential, preceding them is the source of their realization which must already be real. Thirdly, living bodies are superior to other bodies; and what makes a body living is not the dimensions which make it a body (for then everything with dimensions would be living), but something more excellent like a soul. The most excellent existent of all then cannot be a body. So when the scriptures ascribe dimensions to God they are using spatial extension to symbolize the extent of God's power; just as they ascribe bodily organs to God as metaphors for their functions, and postures like sitting or standing to symbolize authority or strength.","author":"Thomas Aquinas","tags":["god","philosophy","semantics","theology"],"id":17476,"author_id":"Thomas+Aquinas"},{"text":"Beware the man of a single book.","author":"Thomas Aquinas","tags":["books-reading","ignorance","illiteracy","limitation"],"id":33493,"author_id":"Thomas+Aquinas"},{"text":"Yet through virtuous living man is further ordained to a higher end, which consists in the enjoyment of God, as we have said above. Consequently, since society must have the same end as the individual man, it is not the ultimate end of an assembled multitude to live virtuously, but through virtuous living to attain to the possession of God.","author":"Thomas Aquinas","tags":["king","philosophy","political-philosophy","politics","society"],"id":42073,"author_id":"Thomas+Aquinas"},{"text":"The things that we love tell us what we are.","author":"Thomas Aquinas","tags":["love","us","things "],"id":63820,"author_id":"Thomas+Aquinas"},{"text":"The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is to things made by his art.","author":"Thomas Aquinas","tags":["art","god","things "],"id":67439,"author_id":"Thomas+Aquinas"},{"text":"It must be said that charity can, in no way, exist along with mortal sin.","author":"Thomas Aquinas","tags":["catholic-church","morality","saint"],"id":76556,"author_id":"Thomas+Aquinas"},{"text":"Law is nothing other than a certain ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by the person who has the care of the community.","author":"Thomas Aquinas","tags":["community","law","care "],"id":77703,"author_id":"Thomas+Aquinas"},{"text":"The emotion of love is an affective emotion, directly reacting to goodness, rather than an aggressive one, reacting to challenge. Not only our so-called natural ability to grow and propagate exemplify natural love, but every faculty has a built-in affinity for what accords with its nature. By passion we mean some result of being acted on: either a form induced by the agent (like weight) or a movement consequent on the form (like falling to the ground). Whatever we desire acts on us in this way, first arousing an emotional attachment to itself and making itself agreeable, and then drawing us to seek it. The first change the object produces in our appetite is a feeling of its agreeableness: we call this love (weight can be thought of as a sort of natural love); then desire moves us to seek the object and pleasure comes to rest in it. Clearly then, as a change induced in us by an agent, love is a passion: the affective emotion strictly so, the will to love by stretching of the term. Love unites by making what is loved as agreeable to the lover as if it were himself or a part of himself. Though love is not itself a movement of the appetite towards an object, it is a change the appetite undergoes rendering an object agreeable. Favour is a freely chosen and willing love, open only to reasoning creatures; and charity―literally, holding dear―is a perfect form of love in which what is loved is highly prized. To love, as Aristotle says, is to want someone’s good; so its object is twofold: the good we want, loved with a love of desire, and the someone we want it for (ourselves or someone else), loved with a love of friendship. And just as what exist in the primary sense are subjects of existence, and properties exist only in a secondary sense, as modes in which subjects exist; so too what we love in the primary sense is the someone whose good we will, and only in a secondary sense do we love the good so willed. Friendship based on convenience or pleasure is friendship inasmuch as we want our friend’s good; but because this is subordinated to our own profit or pleasure such friendship is subordinated to love of desire and falls short of true friendship.","author":"Thomas Aquinas","tags":["love","philosophy","theology"],"id":83783,"author_id":"Thomas+Aquinas"},{"text":"Moral science is better occupied when treating of friendship than of justice.","author":"Thomas Aquinas","tags":["friendship","justice","moral "],"id":87034,"author_id":"Thomas+Aquinas"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":59,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}