To bear with patience wrongs done to oneself is a mark of perfection, but to bear with patience wrongs done to someone else is a mark of imperfection and even of actual sin.
Thomas AquinasRead
We are like children, who stand in need of masters to enlighten us and direct us; God has provided for this, by appointing his angels to be our teachers and guides.
Interpretation
We require guidance and enlightenment from higher beings, akin to children needing teachers.
In this quote, Thomas Aquinas emphasizes the necessity of guidance and wisdom in our lives. Just as children rely on their teachers for knowledge and direction, humans depend on divine beings such as angels to enlighten and guide them on their journey through life. This suggests a belief in the importance of seeking knowledge and understanding through higher authorities.
In practice
In a sermon about seeking divine guidance, this quote can highlight the role of faith.
To bear with patience wrongs done to oneself is a mark of perfection, but to bear with patience wrongs done to someone else is a mark of imperfection and even of actual sin.
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.
Now this relaxation of the mind from work consists on playful words or deeds. Therefore it becomes a wise and virtuous man to have recourse to such things at times.
A song is the exultation of the mind dwelling on eternal things, bursting forth in the voice.
To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.
Man cannot live without joy; therefore when he is deprived of true spiritual joys it is necessary that he become addicted to carnal pleasures.
There is a very remarkable inclination in human nature to bestow on external objects the same emotions which it observes in itself, and to find every where those ideas which are most present to it.
All her knowledge is gone now. Everything she ever learned, or heard, or saw. Her particular way of looking at Hamlet or daisies or thinking about love, all her private intricate thoughts, her inconsequential secret musings – they’re gone too. I heard this expression once: Each time someone dies, a library burns. I’m watching it burn right to the ground.
It has always irked me as improper that there are still so many people for whom the sky is no more than a mass of random points of light. I do not see why we should recognize a house, a tree, or a flower here below and not, for example, the red Arcturus up there in the heavens as it hangs from its constellation Bootes, like a basket hanging from a balloon.
God has ordained that Satan have a long leash with God holding on to the leash because he knows that when we walk in and out of those temptations, struggling with both the physical effects that they bring and the moral effects that they bring, more of God's glory will shine.
We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
I was never an assimilationist. I always thought gays had some special mission.
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