“Faith does not quench desire, but inflames it.” — St. Thomas Aquinas

“Virtue needs a director and guide. Vice can be learned even without a teacher.” — Seneca

“Now Jesus Christ has all these passions (He is fully man), but He is in perfect control of each one. He perfectly loves sinners. He perfectly hates sins. He was perfectly angry at the money changers with the precise amount of anger needed and only for the precise amount of time that the situation required. Sometimes Christians can assume that being holy is to lack passion. They think that Spock from Star Trek is the ideal. Not so. This belief is repackaged Stoicism. Thomas Aquinas rejected this Stoic idea of the passions as incompatible with Scripture. God wants you to be a fully passionate person. Yet he wants those passions submitted to right reason. If you are becoming a saint, people should see that you’re rightly passionate about God and your neighbors. Your passions will be like a symphony under a masterful conductor.” — Dr. Taylor Marshall

“Reason’s job, with the aid of thumos, is to discern the best aims to pursue, and then train his “horses” to work together towards those aims. As the charioteer, he must have vision and purpose — he must know where he is going — and he must understand the nature and desires of his two horses if he wishes to properly harness their energies. A charioteer can err by either failing to hitch one of the horses to the chariot altogether, or by failing to bridle the horse, and instead letting him run wild.” — Brett & Kate McKay

“The law is reason unaffected by desire.” — Aristotle

“The greatest man is he who chooses right with the most invincible resolution; who resists to sorest temptation from within and without; who bears the heaviest burdens cheerfully; who is calmest in storms, and most fearless under menaces and frowns; whose reliance on truth, on virtue, and on God is most unfaltering.” — Seneca

“The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.” — Aristotle

“The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it.” — Augustus Hare

“It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.” — Aristotle

“The acquisition of knowledge is always of use to the intellect, because it may thus drive out useless things and retain the good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.” — Leonardo da Vinci

“If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the good. Will not knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.” — Aristotle

“Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Man, as an originator of action, is a union of desire and intellect.” — Aristotle

“The largest part of goodness is the will to become good.” — Seneca

“The truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow.” — Aristotle

“True happiness comes from gaining insight and growing into your best possible self. Otherwise all you're having is immediate gratification pleasure, which is fleeting and doesn't grow you as a person.” — Aristotle

“We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed? What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.” — Seneca

“World hinges on moral foundations. God has made it so! God has made the universe to be based on a moral law. So long as man disobeys it he is revolting against God. That’s what we need in the world today: people who will stand for right and goodness.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.