And since perfected souls will be incapable of envy, all will rejoice in their lesser level of brightness, because it will be exactly what God wills for the common good; and all will identify with tha...
A habit is a stable disposition to act in a certain way, good or evil. Virtues are good habits; vices are bad habits.
A great story must have, first of all, a good plot, a great deed, a good work, something worth doing. You cannot write a great story about saving a button on a sweater and nothing more. You can, howev...
A certain participation in happiness can be had in this life, but perfect and true happiness cannot be had in this life.
5. You can’t prove a lot of things that it would be lunacy to deny—for instance, that human reason is trustworthy, that it is not being hypnotized by a demon at every moment. Of course that thought is...
For instance, it is a hate crime to quote certain politically incorrect verses from the Bible, especially the Old Testament, in any public arena.)
Shows how fruitful analogies can be—not in proving points but in illustrating them, showing spiritual truths by means of material images.
Our ego is not God. In fact, it is often wrong, because it is fallen, foolish, and faithless.
[T]o scorn the dictate of reason is to scorn the commandment of God (I-II,19,5).
You see, passion alone is a blind power. It’s fire without light. It just ignites whatever it touches, good or evil, truth or lies, unselfishness or selfishness, love or lust.
What the Church is sent apostolically to do is to make saints, i.e., to make humans completely human. This phrase, completely human, is often misused today to mean its exact opposite, to reduce the Ch...
We too can love with the will even when we do not have loving emotions or feelings. We make this distinction toward ourselves quite easily, so we should be able to do it toward others too when necessa...
The good news part of this point is that we can cooperate in salvation, as we cannot cooperate in creation.
The two most popular forms of this are the Oriental form of ignoring real physical evils by creating a mystical inner paradise through yoga and meditation,
St. Thomas thus detects a primary source of presumption in seeking genuinely good things, like human happiness on earth, as if we did not need divine grace to attain them; and in the hope that we can...
Since God writes history as man writes words, the literal events of history can be signs of other truths just as human words are signs of things other than themselves.
Reason is His voice, His interior prophet, in our souls. We call that prophet conscience. (St. Thomas used two terms for it: synderesis was the awareness of its reality and truth and authority and rul...
Prayer is not only conversation, it is transformation. It is not only light, it is fire. And the closer you get to Him, the hotter the fire gets. Words begin to melt. The first word that melts in His...
Our attempts at charity without God, our attempts at charity before faith and hope, all fail because they are based on ourselves and our own false sufficiency and our own righteousness as their founda...
Light, life, and love parallel the three absolute values of truth, goodness, and beauty, the supreme values of the three parts of the soul; intellect, will, and emotions. God is all truth, goodness, a...