I know St. Thomas Aquinas calls eternity, nunc stans, and ever-abiding now; which is easy enough to say, but though I fain would, ...yet I could never conceive it: they that can are more happy than I.... I understand as little how it can be true his Lordship says, that God is not just, but justice itself; not wise, but wisdom itself; not eternal, but eternity itself;... These phrases I find not in the Scripture; I wonder therefore what was the design of the Schoolmen to bring them up, unless they thought a man could not be a true Christian unless his understanding be first strangled with such hard sayings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Broadway, such as I see it now and have seen it for twenty- five years, is a ramp that was conceived by St. Thomas Aquinas while h...e was yet in the womb. It was meant originally to be used only by snakes and lizards, by the horned toad and the red heron, but when the great Spanish Armada was sunk the human kind wriggled out of the ketch and slopped over, creating by a sort of foul, ignominious squirm and wiggle the cunt-like cleft that runs from the Battery south to the golf links north through the dead and wormy center of Manhattan Island.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poet, the dramatist, the novelist are free to exercise their imagination as widely as they choose. But the historian may not b...e allowed so long a tether. He must fulfill his function as creative artist only within very rigid limits. He cannot invent what went on in the mind of St. Thomas of Canterbury. The poet can. He cannot suppress inconvenient minor characters and invent others who more significantly underline the significance of his theme. The novelist can. The dramatist can. The historian, as Sir Phillip Sydney has said, "is captive to the truth of a foolish world." Not only is he captive to the truth of a foolish world, but he is captive to a truth he can never fully discover, and yet he is forbidden by his conscience and his training from inventing it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every judgement of conscience, be it right or wrong, be it about things evil in themselves or morally indifferent, is obligatory, ...in such wise that he who acts against his conscience always sins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 t...o things made by his art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love works in a circle, for the beloved moves the lover by stamping a likeness, and the lover then goes out to hold the beloved in... reality. Who first was the beginning now becomes the end of motion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is certain and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is moved is moved by another....... If that by which it is moved be itself moved, then this also must needs be moved by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover and, consequently, no other mover, seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are moved by the first mover, as the staff moves only because it is moved by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, moved by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »