Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas takes an emotion people treat as airy and rehabilitates it as a disciplined engine of inquiry. “Wonder” isn’t a decorative mood or a childlike gasp at the universe; it’s desire with an object: knowledge. In a medieval world where truth is assumed to be coherent because it’s grounded in God, curiosity can’t just roam. It needs a moral and metaphysical warrant. Aquinas gives it one by framing wonder as appetite - an inner pull toward understanding that belongs to human nature and, by extension, to the Creator’s design.

The subtext is quietly argumentative. Suspicion of curiosity ran deep in Christian tradition: curiosity could be a temptation, a lust for novelty, a detour into vanity. Aquinas draws a boundary line: not all inquisitiveness is spiritual restlessness. Proper wonder is ordered; it’s the first movement of intellect toward truth, not the ego’s chase for spectacle. That’s why the phrasing is so spare. He doesn’t praise wonder as a virtue outright; he defines it as a desire, then lets the rest of his system supply the legitimacy. Desire becomes the bridge between sensation and scholarship, between seeing the world and seeking its causes.

Context matters: Aquinas is writing in the high scholastic period, when universities, Aristotle’s rediscovered logic, and theological debates are reshaping Europe’s intellectual life. The quote functions like a permission slip for learning. It tells students and believers alike that the startled feeling you get when reality doesn’t fit your categories isn’t a threat to faith; it’s the mind’s honest admission that it’s not finished yet.