Saint Thomas Aquinas Quotes

“It was the outstanding fact about St. Thomas [Aquinas] that he loved books and lived on books ... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, ‘I have understood every page I ever read’.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“Buddhism and Christianity are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative to that divine audacity. It is even true that the truly spiritual and intellectual man sees it as sort of dilemma; a very hard and terrible choice. There is little else on earth that can compare with these for completeness. And he who does not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“If grass grows and withers, it can only mean that it is part of a greater thing, which is even more real; not that the grass is less real than it looks. St. Thomas (Aquinas) has a really logical right to say, in the words of the modern mystic, A. E.: "I begin by the grass to be bound again to the Lord.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“The Saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“To him, even the momentary was momentous.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“Now for St. Francis nothing was ever in the background. We might say that his mind had no background, except perhaps that divine darkness out of which the divine love had called up every colored creature one by one. He saw everything as dramatic, distinct from its setting, not all of a piece like a picture but in action like a play. A bird went by him like an arrow; something with a story and a purpose, though it was a purpose of life and not a purpose of death. A bush could stop him like a brigand; and indeed he was as ready to welcome the brigand as the bush.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“The modern mind is hard to please; and it generally calls the way of Godfrey ferocious and the way of Francis fanatical. That is, it calls any moral method unpractical, when it has just called any practical method immoral.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“I can hardly conceive of any educated man believing in God at all without believing that God contains in Himself every perfection including eternal joy; and does not require the solar system to entertain Him like a circus.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“The adoration of Christ had been a part of the man's passionate nature for a long time past. But the imitation of Christ, as a sort of plan or ordered scheme of life, in that sense may be said to begin here.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“I beseech you, little brothers, that you be as wise as brother Daisy and brother dandelion; for never do they lie awake thinking of tomorrow, yet they have gold crowns like kings and emperors or like Charlemagne in all his glory.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“it needed ten times more courage to look after a leper than to fight for the crown of Sicily”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“One of the Franciscans says later, "A monk should own nothing but his harp"; meaning, I suppose, that he should value nothing but his song, the song with which it was his business as a minstrel to serenade every castle and cottage, the song of the joy of the Creator in His creation and the beauty of the brotherhood of men.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“The transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution; by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God becomes one for whom God illustrates and illuminates all things.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“He liked as he liked; he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“The truth is people who worship health cannot remain healthy on the point.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“We might even say that the one thing which separates a saint from ordinary men is his readiness to be one with ordinary men. In this sense the word ordinary must be understood in its native and noble meaning; which is connected with the word order.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“A saint is long past any desire for distinction; he is the only sort of superior man who has never been a superior person.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas

“The author challenges how much sanctity has to do with sameness, as he says saints are as different from each other as those in any group -- even murderers.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“It is no good to tell an atheist that he is an atheist; or to charge a denier of immortality with the infamy of denying it; or to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he is wrong, by proving that he is wrong on somebody else's principles, but not on his own. After the great example of St. Thomas, the principle stands, or ought always to have stood established; that we must either not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on his grounds and not ours.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“The modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration; and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics as self-evident and enforced them; such as decency or the error of the Adamite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody else, Moslem or Christian, taking his ethics as self-evident and enforcing them; such as reverence or the error of the Atheist heresy. And then he wound up by taking all this lop-sided illogical deadlock, of the unconscious meeting the unfamiliar, and called it the liberality of his own mind. Medieval men thought that if a social system was founded on a certain idea it must fight for that idea, whether it was as simple as Islam or as carefully balanced as Catholicism. Modern men really think the same thing, as is clear when communists attack their ideas of property. Only they do not think it so clearly, because they have not really thought out their idea of property.”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

“You will not be able rationally to read the Gospel and regard the Crucifixion as an afterthought or an anti-climax or an accident in the life of Christ; it is obviously the point of the story like the point of a sword, the sword that pierced the heart of the Mother of God. And you will not be able rationally to read the story of a man presented as a Mirror of Christ without understanding his final phase as a Man of Sorrows,”
― G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi