Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Aquinas

For a medieval theologian who treated the universe as a ladder of goods, Aquinas’s line lands with a kind of calibrated provocation: after God, grace, salvation, sacraments, and an entire moral architecture, he still reaches for friendship as the most prizeworthy thing “on this earth.” The phrase does quiet doctrinal work. It draws a border around earthly life without dismissing it, insisting that the most valuable human possession isn’t property, status, or even private virtue, but a relationship that trains you in the habits heaven requires.

Aquinas is writing in a culture where social bonds were often transactional: patronage, fealty, clan obligation, the strategic marriage. “True friendship” signals something rarer and ethically thicker. In his Aristotelian framework, it’s not mere affection; it’s willing the good of the other for the other’s sake. That definition smuggles in a whole program for community: friendship becomes a moral technology, a way of practicing charity in miniature, with feedback. You can’t fake it for long; friendship exposes character by demanding consistency when there’s no obvious payoff.

The superlative “nothing…more to be prized” isn’t sentimentality; it’s ranking. Aquinas elevates friendship because it stabilizes the soul against the isolating temptations of pride and greed, and because it makes goodness social rather than solitary. The subtext is almost political: a society held together by coercion or advantage is brittle, but one knitted by chosen loyalty has resilience. In an era obsessed with eternal ends, he’s also offering a humane concession: the road to the divine runs through people, not around them.