St. Augustine of Hippo

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

 “Because God has made us for Himself, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.”

“Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies.”

“People travel to wonder
at the height of the mountains,
at the huge waves of the seas,
at the long course of the rivers,
at the vast compass of the ocean,
at the circular motion of the stars,
and yet they pass by themselves
without wondering. ”

“There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.”

“Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Faith is to believe what you do not yet see; the reward for this faith is to see what you believe.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “God has promised forgiveness to your repentance, but He has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Love begins with a smile, grows with a kiss, and ends with a teardrop.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“In order to discover the character of people we have only to observe what they love.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of Saint Augustine

 “Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “God provides the wind, Man must raise the sail. ”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Christ is not valued at all, unless he is valued above all.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Patience is the companion of wisdom.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Tolle, lege: take up and read.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Love, and do what you will. If you keep silence, do it out of love. If you cry out, do it out of love. If you refrain from punishing, do it out of love.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Oh, God, to know you is life. To serve You is freedom. To praise you is the soul's joy and delight. Guard me with the power of Your grace here and in all places. Now and at all times, forever. Amen.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, City of God

“Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Love God, and do what you like.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“In my deepest wound I saw your glory, and it dazzled me.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “And men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, yet pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Does God proclaim Himself in the wonders of creation? No. All things proclaim Him, all things speak. Their beauty is the voice by which they announce God, by which they sing, "It is you who made me beautiful, not me myself but you.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Love is the beauty of the soul”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Sin is Energy in the wrong channel. ”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Where your pleasure is, there is your treasure: where your treasure, there your heart; where your heart, there your happiness”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Humility must accompany all our actions, must be with us everywhere; for as soon as we glory in our good works they are of no further value to our advancement in virtue. ”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“The good Christian should beware of mathematicians. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God. (City of God, Book 19)”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“There can only be two basic loves... the love of God unto the forgetfulness of self, or the love of self unto the forgetfulness and denial of God.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Our hearts have been made for you, O God, and they shall never rest until they rest in you.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“We made bad use of immortality, and so ended up dying; Christ made good use of mortality, so that we might end up living.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Teaching Christianity

 “If you understood him, it would not be God.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Pray as though everything depends on God. And work as if everything depends on you.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Belatedly I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new, belatedly I loved thee. For see, thou wast within and I was without, and I sought thee out there. Unlovely, I rushed heedlessly among the lovely things thou hast made. Thou wast with me, but I was not with thee. These things kept me far from thee; even though they were not at all unless they were in thee. Thou didst call and cry aloud, and didst force open my deafness. Thou didst gleam and shine, and didst chase away my blindness. Thou didst breathe fragrant odors and I drew in my breath; and now I pant for thee. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst. Thou didst touch me, and I burned for thy peace.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“God grants us not always what we ask so as to bestow something preferable.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“A Christian should be an Alleluia from head to foot”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“I held my heart back from positively accepting anything, since I was afraid of another fall, and in this condition of suspense I was being all the more killed.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“I have said before, and shall say again, that I write this book for love of your love.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

Watch, O Lord,
with those who wake,
or watch or weep tonight,
and give your angels charge
over those who sleep.
Tend your sick ones,
O Lord Jesus Christ;
rest your weary ones;
bless your dying ones;
soothe your suffering ones;
pity your afflicted ones;
shield your joyous ones;
and all for your love's sake.
Amen.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Really great things, when discussed by little men, can usually make such men grow big.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “No one knows what he himself is made of, except his own spirit within him, yet there is still some part of him which remains hidden even from his own spirit; but you, Lord, know everything about a human being because you have made him...Let me, then, confess what I know about myself, and confess too what I do not know, because what I know of myself I know only because you shed light on me, and what I do not know I shall remain ignorant about until my darkness becomes like bright noon before your face.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Even the straws under my knees shout to distract me from prayer”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“I recall how miserable I was, and how one day you brought me to a realization of my miserable state. I was preparing to deliver a eulogy upon the emperor in which I would tell plenty of lies with the object of winning favor with the well-informed by my lying; so my heart was panting with anxiety and seething with feverish, corruptive thoughts. As I passed through a certain district in Milan I noticed a poor beggar, drunk, as I believe, and making merry. I groaned and pointed out to the friends who were with me how many hardships our idiotic enterprises entailed. Goaded by greed, I was dragging my load of unhappiness along, and feeling it all the heavier for being dragged. Yet while all our efforts were directed solely to the attainment of unclouded joy, it appeared that this beggar had already beaten us to the goal, a goal which we would perhaps never reach ourselves. With the help of the few paltry coins he had collected by begging this man was enjoying the temporal happiness for which I strove by so bitter, devious and roundabout a contrivance. His joy was no true joy, to be sure, but what I was seeking in my ambition was a joy far more unreal; and he was undeniably happy while I was full of foreboding; he was carefree, I apprehensive. If anyone had questioned me as to whether I would rather be exhilarated or afraid, I would of course have replied, "Exhilarated"; but if the questioner had pressed me further, asking whether I preferred to be like the beggar, or to be as I was then, I would have chosen to be myself, laden with anxieties and fears. Surely that would have been no right choice, but a perverse one? I could not have preferred my condition to his on the grounds that I was better educated, because that fact was not for me a source of joy but only the means by which I sought to curry favor with human beings: I was not aiming to teach them but only to win their favor.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Variation on the middle sentence: A thing is not necessarily false because it is badly expressed, nor true because it is expressed magnificently.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Sin is looking for the right thing in the wrong place.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Heaven forbid that we should believe in such a way as not to accept or seek reasons, since we could not even believe if we did not possess rational souls.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Since God is the highest good, he would not allow any evil to exist in his works unless his omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “It is not that we keep His commandments first and that then He loves but that He loves us and then we keep His commandments. This is that grace which is revealed to the humble but hidden from the proud.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he lives so as to make happiness impossible.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“He loves Thee too little, who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Give me yourself, O my God, give yourself back to me. Lo, I love you, but if my love is too mean, let me love more passionately. I cannot gauge my love, nor know how far it fails, how much more love I need for my life to set its course straight into your arms, never swerving until hidden in the covert of your face. This alone I know, that without you all to me is misery, woe outside myself and woe within, and all wealth but penury, if it is not my God.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“What are kingdoms without justice? They're just gangs of bandits.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, City of God

“I was unhappy and so is every soul unhappy which is tied to its love for mortal things; when it loses them, it is torn in pieces, and it is then that it comes to realize the unhappiness which was there even before it lost them.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “What madness, to love a man as something more than human! I lived in a fever, convulsed with tears and sighs that allowed me neither rest nor peace of mind. My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry. Everything that was not what my friend had been was dull and distasteful. I had heart only for sighs and tears, for in them alone I found some shred of consolation.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “We speak, but it is God who teaches.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Theft is punished by Your law, O Lord, and by the law written in men's hearts, which iniquity itself cannot blot out. For what thief will suffer a thief? Even a rich thief will not suffer him who is driven to it by want. Yet had I a desire to commit robbery, and did so, compelled neither by hunger, nor poverty through a distaste for well-doing, and a lustiness of iniquity. For I pilfered that of which I had already sufficient, and much better. Nor did I desire to enjoy what I pilfered, but the theft and sin itself. There was a pear-tree close to our vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was tempting neither for its colour nor its flavour. To shake and rob this some of us wanton young fellows went, late one night (having, according to our disgraceful habit, prolonged our games in the streets until then), and carried away great loads, not to eat ourselves, but to fling to the very swine, having only eaten some of them; and to do this pleased us all the more because it was not permitted.Behold my heart, O my God; behold my heart, which You had pity upon when in the bottomless pit. Behold, now, let my heart tell You what it was seeking there, that I should be gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved to perish. I loved my own error— not that for which I erred, but the error itself. Base soul, falling from Your firmament to utter destruction— not seeking anything through the shame but the shame itself!”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Though defensive violence will always be 'a sad necessity' in the eyes of men of principle, it would be still more unfortunate if wrongdoers should dominate just men.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “You called and shouted and burst my deafness. You flashed, shone, and scattered my blindness. You breathed odors, and I drew in breath and panted for You. I tasted, and I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for Your peace.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “If you would attain to what you are not yet, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself there you have remained. Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Narrow is the mansion of my soul; enlarge Thou it, that Thou mayest enter in. It is ruinous; repair Thou it. It has that within which must offend Thine eyes; I confess and know it. But who shall cleanse it? or to whom should I cry, save Thee? Lord, cleanse me from my secret faults, and spare Thy servant from the power of the enemy. I believe, and therefore do I speak.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “What do I love when I love my God?”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Pray as if everything depends on God. Work as if everything depends on you.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Yet we must say something when those who say the most are saying nothing.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “For a sentence is not complete unless each word, once its syllables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next...They are set up on the course of their existence, and the faster they climb towards its zenith, the more they hasten towards the point where they exist no more.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “A person can do other things against his will, but belief is possible only in one who is willing. ”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “For great are you, Lord, and you look kindly on what is humble, but the lofty-minded you regard from afar. Only to those whose hearts are crushed do you draw close. You will not let yourself be found by the proud, nor even by those who in their inquisitive skill count stars or grains of sand, or measure the expanses of heaven, or trace the paths of the planets.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

«How high a price we pay for the burden of habit! I am fitted for life here where I do not want to be, I want to live there but am unfit for it, and on both counts I am miserable.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “For you [God] are infinite and never change. In you 'today' never comes to an end: and yet our 'today' does come to an end in you, because time, as well as everything else, exists in you. If it did not, it would have no means of passing. And since your years never come to an end, for you they are simply 'today'...But you yourself are eternally the same. In your 'today' you will make all that is to exist tomorrow and thereafter, and in your 'today' you have made all that existed yesterday and for ever before.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“la mesure de l'amour c'est d'aimer sans mesure”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Too late came I to love you, O Beauty both so ancient and so new! Too late came I to love you - and behold you were with me all the time . . .”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Les Confessions

“What I needed most was to love and to be loved, eager to be caught. Happily I wrapped those painful bonds around me; and sure enough, I would be lashed with the red-hot pokers of jealousy, by suspicions and fear, by burst of anger and quarrels”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Love is ever new because it never groweth old.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“I will plant my feet on that step where my parents put me as a child, until self-evident truth comes to light.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “The world is a book, and those who don't travel only read one page.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “You have been professing yourself reluctant to throw off your load of illusion because truth was uncertain. Well, it is certain now, yet the burden still weighs you down, while other people are given wings on freer shoulders, people who have not worn themselves out with research, nor spent a decade and more reflecting on these questions.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “My questioning was my attentive spirit,
and their reply, their beauty.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Can human folly harbour a more arrogant or ungrateful thought than the notion that whereas God makes man beautiful in body, man makes himself pure in heart?”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Select Letters

“Learn to dance, so when you get to heaven the angels know what to do with you.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “To my God a heart of flame; To my fellow man a heart of love; To myself a heart of steel.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“O Lord my God, tell me what you are to me. Say to my soul, I am your salvation. Say it so that I can hear it. My heart is listening, Lord; open the ears of my heard and say to my soul, I am your salvation. Let me run toward this voice and seize hold of you. Do not hide your face from me: let me die so that I may see it, for not to see it would be death to me indeed.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Our whole business therefore in this life is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “God gives where he finds empty hands.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Such is the strength of the burden of habit. Here I have the power to be but do not wish it. There I wish to be but lacks the power. On both grounds, I'm in misery.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“it is a higher glory... to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with the sword, and to procure or maintain peace by peace, not by war.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, The Political Writings, New Edition

“You never go away from us, yet we have difficulty in returning to You. Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back. Kindle and seize us. Be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love. Let us run.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“This is what we love in friends. We love to the point that human conscience feels guilty if we do not love the person who is loving us, and if that love is not returned - without demanding any physical response other than the marks of affectionate good will.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“When it happens that I am more moved by the song than the thing which is sung, I confess that I sin in a manner deserving punishment”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “For you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “The soul is "torn apart in a painful condition as long as it prefers the eternal because of its Truth but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind commands the hand to move, and it so easy that one hardly distinguishes the order from its execution. Yet mind is mind and hand is body. The mind orders the mind to will. The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “He who loves the coming of the Lord is not he who affirms that it is far off, nor is it he who says it is near, but rather he who, whether it be far off or near, awaits it with sincere faith, steadfast hope, and fervent love.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“When men cannot communicate their thoughts to each other, simply because of difference of language, all the similarity of their common human nature is of no avail to unite them in fellowship.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, City of God

“I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Find out how much God has given you and from it take what you need; the remainder is needed by others.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Life is a misery, death an uncertainty. Suppose it steals suddenly upon me, in what state shall I leave this world? When can I learn what I have here neglected to learn? Or is it true that death will cut off and put an end to all care and all feeling? This is something to be inquired into.

But no, this cannot be true. It is not for nothing, it is not meaningless that all over the world is displayed the high and towering authority of the Christian faith.

Such great and wonderful things would never have been done for us by God, if the life of the soul were to end with the death of the body. Why then do I delay? Why do I not abandon my hopes of this world and devote myself entirely to the search for God and for the happy life?”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“God bids you not to commit lechery, that is, not to have sex with any woman except your wife. You ask of her that she should not have sex with anyone except you -- yet you are not willing to observe the same restraint in return. Where you ought to be ahead of your wife in virtue, you collapse under the onset of lechery. ... Complaints are always being made about men's lechery, yet wives do not dare to find fault with their husbands for it. Male lechery is so brazen and so habitual that it is now sanctioned [= permitted], to the extent that men tell their wives that lechery and adultery are legitimate for men but not for women.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Sermons 1-19

 “[Y]ou are not ashamed of your sin [in committing adultery] because so many men commit it. Man's wickedness is now such that men are more ashamed of chastity than of lechery. Murderers, thieves, perjurers, false witnesses, plunderers and fraudsters are detested and hated by people generally, but whoever will sleep with his servant girl in brazen lechery is liked and admired for it, and people make light of the damage to his soul. And if any man has the nerve to say that he is chaste and faithful to his wife and this gets known, he is ashamed to mix with other men, whose behaviour is not like his, for they will mock him and despise him and say he's not a real man; for man's wickedness is now of such proportions that no one is considered a man unless he is overcome by lechery, while one who overcomes lechery and stays chaste is considered unmanly.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Sermons 1-19

 “There is no sin unless through a man's own will, and hence the reward when we do right things also of our own will."
(Against Fortunatus)”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, The Manichean Debate: The Works of Saint Augustine

 “Always add, always walk, always proceed; neither stand still, nor go back, nor deviate; he that standeth still proceedeth not; he goeth back that continueth not; he deviateth that revolteth; he goeth better that creepeth in his way than he that moveth out of his way.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Your best servant is the person who does not attend so much to hearing what he himself wants as to willing what he has heard from you.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“My sin grew sleek on my excesses.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“What matters it to me if someone does not understand this? Let him too rejoice and say, “What is this?” Let him rejoice even at this, and let him love to find you while not finding it out, rather than, while finding it out, not to find you.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions Of Saint Augustine

“To what place can I invite you, then, since I am in you? Or where could you come from, in order to come into me? To what place outside heaven and earth could I travel, so that my God could come to me there, the God who said, I fill heaven and Earth?”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“In the usual course of study I had come to a book of a certain Cicero.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Anyone who does not love Him Who made man has not learned to love man aright.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Select Letters

 “I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn't find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance – You oh God – towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matter.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “No longer was he the man who had joined the crowd; he was now one of the crowd he had joined, and a genuine companion of those who had led him there.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Is truth then a nothing, simply because it is not spread out through space either finite or infinite?" Then from afar you cried to me, "By no means, for I am who I am.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others to be enjoyed and used.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine

 “How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose..! You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place.... O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

tags: freedom , joy

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“What is going on in our minds, then, that we should be more highly delighted at finding cherished objects, or having them restored to us, than if we had always kept them safe?”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

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“and even now we labor in our residual gloom, until in your only Son we become your righteousness; for that righteousness is like God's high and holy mountains, while your judgments, which were all the being we then had, are like the deep.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Nemo nisi per amicitiam cognoscitur. (No one learns except by friendship.)”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“Le bonheur, c'est continuer à désirer ce que l'on a déjà.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “The Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Every day my conscience makes confession relying on the hope of Your mercy as more to be trusted than its own innocence.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “I count myself one of the number of those who write as they learn and learn as they write.” Augustine/John Calvin”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “HE THAT LOVETH LITTLE PRAYETH LITTLE, HE THAT LOVETH MUCH PRAYETH MUCH.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “He was not utterly unskilled in handling his own lack of training, and he refused to be rashly drawn into a controversy about those matters from which there would be no exit nor easy way of retreat. This was an additional ground for my pleasure. For the controlled modesty of a mind that admits limitations is more beautiful than the things I was anxious to know about.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Do they desire to join me in thanksgiving when they hear how, by your gift, I have come close to you, and do they pray for me when they hear how I am held back by my own weight? ...A brotherly mind will love in me what you teach to be lovable, and will regret in me what you teach to be regrettable. This is a mark of a Christian brother's mind, not an outsider's--not that of 'the sons of aliens whose mouth speaks vanity, and their right hand is a right hand of iniquity' (Ps. 143:7 f.). A brotherly person rejoices on my account when he approves me, but when he disapproves, he is loving me. To such people I will reveal myself. They will take heart from my good traits, and sigh with sadness at my bad ones. My good points are instilled by you and are your gifts. My bad points are my faults and your judgements on them. Let them take heart from the one and regret the other. Let both praise and tears ascend in your sight from brotherly hearts, your censers. ...But you Lord...Make perfect my imperfections”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “I had not yet fallen in love, but I was in love with the idea of it, and this feeling that something was missing around me made me despise myself for not being more anxious to satisfy the need. I began to look around for some object for my love, since I badly wanted to love something. I had no liking for the safe path without pitfalls, for although my real need was for you, my God, who are the food of the soul, I was not aware of this hunger.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “I probably felt more resentment for what I personally was to suffer than for the wrong they were doing to anyone and everyone. But at that time I was determined not to put up with badly behaved people more out of my own interest than because I wanted them to become good people.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Let us, on both sides, lay aside all arrogance. Let us not, on either side, claim that we have already discovered the truth. Let us seek it together as something which is known to neither of us. For then only may we seek it, lovingly and tranquilly, if there be no bold presumption that it is already discovered and possessed.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away. ”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions

 “I heard Your voice from on high. "I am the food of the fully grown. Grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change Me into you, like the food of flesh eats. But you will be changed into Me.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“The wicked have told me of things that delight them, but not such things as your law has to tell.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “You are not the mind itself. For You are the Lord God of the mind. All these things are liable to change, but You remain immutable above all things.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “You are my Lord, because You have no need of my goodness.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “i understand that i understand”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “There is no health in those who are displeased by an element in Your creation, just as there was none in me when I was displeased by many things You had made. Because my soul didn't dare to say that my God displeased me, it refused to attribute to You whatever was displeasing.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Time takes no holiday. It does not roll idly by, but through our senses works its own wonders in the mind. Time came and went from one day to the next; in its coming and its passing it brought me other hopes and other memories. [quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 54]”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “By means of corporal and temporal things we may comprehend the eternal and the spiritual.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Let the Lord your God be your hope – seek for nothing else from him, but let him himself be your hope. There are people who hope from him riches or perishable and transitory honours, in short they hope to get from God things which are not God himself.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Daily Readings with St. Augustine

 “Free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under Your Law.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Every visible thing in this world is put in the charge of an Angel.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

 “Let such a person rejoice even to ask the question, "What does this mean?" Yes, let him rejoice in that, and choose to find by not finding rather than by finding fail to find you.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “It would have been more profitable to love the sun in the sky, which at least our eyes perceive truly, than those chimeras offered to a mind that had been led astray through its eyes.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “When you suddenly command some unusual, unexpected course of action, then even if it is something you have hitherto forbidden, even if for the time being you conceal the reason for your behest, and even if it contravenes the accepted norms of a human society, can we doubt that it is right to obey, seeing that a human society is just precisely insofar as it serves you? Blessed are they who know that you have commanded them. Everything that is done by your servants is done either to make plain what needs to be revealed at present, or to foreshadow the future.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “See, those things go their way that others may succeed them, and that a whole may exist comprised of all its parts, though a lowly whole indeed. "But I," says the Word of God, "shall I depart to any place?" Fix your dwelling there, my soul, lay up there for safe-keeping whatever you have thence received, if only because you are weary of deceits.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “O mortals, how long will you be heavy-hearted? Life has come down to you, and are you reluctant to ascend and live? But what room is there for you to ascend, you with your high-flown ways and lofty talk? Come down, that you may ascend, ascend even to God...”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Furthermore, what profit was it to me that I, rascally slave of selfish ambitions that I was, read and understood by myself as many books as I could get concerning the so-called liberal arts?...I had turned my back to the light and my face to the things it illuminated, and so no light played upon my own face, or on the eyes that perceived them.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Someone who knows enough to become the owner of a tree, and gives thanks to you for the benefits it brings him, is in a better state, even if ignorant of its height in feet and the extent of its spread, than another who measures and counts all its branches but neither owns it nor knows its creator nor loves him.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Often the contempt of vainglory becomes a source of even more vainglory, for it is not being scorned when the contempt is something one is proud of.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Why, then, do I set before You an ordered account of so many things? it's certainly not through me that You know them. But I'm stirring up love for You in myself and in those who read this so that we may all say, great is the Lord and highly worthy to be praised. I tell my story for love of Your love.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 “Nonetheless the memory of you stayed with me, and I had no doubt whatever whom I ought to cling to, though I knew that I was not yet capable of clinging, because the perishable body weighs down the soul, and its earthly habitation oppresses a mind teeming with thoughts.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions