Thomas Aquinas Quotes

Nothing can be created out of nothing.

Nothing proceeds from nothingness, as also nothing passes away into non-existence.

The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.

I am talking to you, but the moment I am talking to you, the universe is being created and destroyed.

To have dragons one must have change; that is the first principle of dragon lore.

In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming.

The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything.

It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.

Our way out involves both resistance and renewal: saying no to what is, so that we can reshape and recreate the world. Our challenge is communal, but to face it we must be empowered as individuals and create structures of support and celebration that can teach us freedom. Creation is the ultimate resistance, the ultimate refusal to accept things as they are. For it is in creation that we encounter Mystery.

When you don't understand, you depend on reality. When you do understand, reality depends on you.

To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.

Creation is the great redemption from suffering and all life's growing light. But the creator must be suffering if needed and accept much change.

There is no justice, there is no rational structure to it [life]. That is just the way it is, and each person figures out some way to cope.

From What-is all the world of things was born But What-is sprang in turn from What-is-not.

Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?

What is the universe? Is it a great 3D movie in which we are the unwilling actors? Is it a cosmic joke, a giant computer, a work of art by a Supreme Being or simply an experiment? The problem in trying to understand the universe is that we have nothing to compare it to.

The way I see it, the impossible happens all the time; but we're so good at taking it for granted, we forget it was once impossible.

If we can get to the truth, we can change anything.

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.

Life itself is a strange mixture. We have to take it as it is, try to understand it, and then to better it.