Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas treats love less like a mood and more like moral physics: a force that actually yokes two beings together. “Binding” is doing heavy work here. It’s not romantic glue, and it’s not the sentimental permissiveness modern ears often file under love. It’s a claim about how the self gets reconfigured. To love is to be joined - voluntarily, intelligibly - to “another,” and that union produces a new obligation: the other becomes “cherished by myself,” not as an accessory but as part of what my will now protects.

The subtext is quietly corrective. Aquinas is writing inside a Christian intellectual world where desire can be chaotic, pride can masquerade as virtue, and charity (caritas) is the central discipline. So he defines love in a way that refuses the loopholes. If love binds, you can’t love at arm’s length. If love joins, you can’t reduce the other to a means. And if cherishing happens “by myself,” love isn’t outsourced to social performance or religious rhetoric; it’s an interior act with exterior consequences.

Context matters: medieval theology was trying to map the human person with the tools of Aristotle - will, intellect, virtue - while keeping God as the horizon. Aquinas’s formulation makes love the hinge between metaphysics and ethics. It explains why love can be demanding without being coercive: it’s chosen union that generates care. In a culture saturated with “self-care” language, Aquinas offers a bracing counter-image: love as self-expansion, not self-expression.