Herbert McCabe was not an academic, he was a teacher and a preacher. He was a scholar also, but aiming to the truth for its own sake and, subsequently, for his own life improvement. Not in order to be ‘up-to-date’ with the intellectual fashions of the moment or to flatter his peers. Therefore he focused on the classics, most of all on Aquinas. The result of McCabe's peculiar intellectual attitude was the vast amount of original and impressive ideas he conceived and conveyed despite having written little, in terms of the number of texts and the length of them. The right tribute of praise to a thinker is the presentation of his/her ideas, the test of truth, coherence, originality and power they have in explaining the reality in which we live. This is one of the things that strikes a reader of McCabe's writings. While it is hard to name a single original idea of many authors in vogue, and of most of them only one, it is easy to name many ideas from McCabe. This paper focuses on two of them: 1) freedom as based on knowledge; 2) the meaning of life.