Thomas Aquinas Quotes

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

I don't believe anything till I have seen the proof. For anything without proof, I think we should believe the theory that gives us peace. It doesn't matter whether the theory is true or not.

... I distrust manifest knowledge.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion.

Where doubt there truth is - 'tis her shadow.

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

Faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world.

All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.

We must not let go manifest truths because we cannot answer all questions about them.

The agnostic does not simply say, "l do not know." He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know. He insists that you are trading on the ignorance of others, and on the fear of others. He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know, -- he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact -- he drives you from the realm of reason -- he drives you from the light, into the darkness of conjecture -- into the world of dreams and shadows, and he compels you to say, at last, that your faith has no foundation in fact.

Reason is natural revelation, whereby the eternal father of light, and fountain of all knowledge, communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within the reach of their natural faculties: revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God. . . .

Knowledge, absolutely sure of its infallibility, is faith.

The only people I've met in this world who never doubt are materialists and atheists.

To the medieval mind the possibility of doubt did not exist.

The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.

Seeing is believing and believing is knowing and knowing beats unknowing and the unknown.

Of course, there are always going to be some unsettled areas, but for me the overall evidence for Christianity chases away any real doubt that it's true.

A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.

How many, alas, of the precious saints of God must we shut out from being believers, if there is no faith but what amounts to assurance.... shall we say their faith went away in the departure of their assurance?

I don't want to believe. I want to know.

A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert - himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt - the Divine Reason.