Quotes about Being

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men no having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.

For God would in nothing fail to endow a being who was to be next to Himself with a liberty of this kind.

Teach me, O Lord, to do Your will; teach me to live worthily and humbly in Your sight; for You are my wisdom, who know me truly, and who knew me before the world was made, and before I had my being.

There would not be a perfect likeness of God in the universe if all things were of one grade of being.

Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

I answer that, Every being, as being, is good. For all being, as being, has actuality and is in some way perfect; since every act implies some sort of perfection; and perfection implies desirability and goodness, as is clear from A[1]. Hence it follows that every being as such is good.

The act that anything evil puts forth is due to the strength of goodness, but a deficient goodness. For if there were nothing of good there, neither would there be any being, nor any action: again, if the goodness were not deficient, neither would there be any evil.

In this being may our treatise find its end and fulfillment.

Agere sequitur esse.

There can only be one God according to these arguments for many reasons. First, the God of the Cosmological argument is infinite48since every finite thing needs a cause. And there cannot be two infinite Beings. For in order for there to be two beings of the same kind, they would have to differ. But two infinite Beings do not differ; they are the same kind of Being, namely, infinite. Second, the theistic God (of the Moral Argument) is absolutely perfect.

Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being.

I is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.