Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas refuses the fantasy of sainthood as emotional anesthesia. In a single sentence, he snaps the spine of two temptations: the Stoic dream of being unbothered and the puritanical suspicion that strong feeling is automatically sinful. Moral perfection, for him, is not the deletion of passion but its governance - a vision of virtue as skilled management rather than sterile purity.

The intent is both pastoral and philosophical. Pastoral, because medieval Christianity had to speak to ordinary people who felt anger, desire, fear, and grief and then wondered if those sensations were proof of moral failure. Philosophical, because Aquinas is building a Christianized Aristotelian psychology: human beings are not souls trapped in bodies; they are composites whose appetites and emotions are part of the equipment. Passions are morally pliable. They can be trained to harmonize with reason and aimed at fitting goods. That is why he says "regulates" instead of "suppresses". Regulation implies proportion, timing, and object - not just volume control.

The subtext is a quiet defense of embodied life. Aquinas makes room for righteous anger, for compassion that actually aches, for desire that can be ordered toward love rather than consumption. He also signals a sober realism about holiness: even the most virtuous person still has an interior weather system. What changes is not the existence of storms, but the presence of a pilot.

Context matters: in the 13th century, Aquinas is stitching together theology, ethics, and emerging university scholasticism. His line reads like a rebuttal to extremes on both sides, insisting that virtue is not a denial of human nature but its maturation.