Saint Augustine

Quotes

The world is a great book; he who never stirs from home reads only a page.
My love for you, Lord, is not an uncertain feeling, but a matter of concious certainty. With your word you pierced my heart, and I loved you. But heaven and earth and everything in them on all sides tell me to love you.
...Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.
Total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.
O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.
To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension of things eternal; to knowledge, the rational apprehension of things temporal.
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.
This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfection.
Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.
You (God) have not only commanded continence, that is, from what things we are to restrain our love, but also justice, that is, on what we are to bestow our love.
Hear the other side.
(Audi Partem Alteram)
Conscience and reputation are two things. Conscience is due to yourself, reputation to your neighbour.
Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.
I was in love with loving.
Beauty is indeed a good gift of God; but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.
Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.
The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.
Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
Find out how much God has given you and from it take what you need; the remainder is needed by others.
God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.
Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.
Patience is the companion of wisdom.
The purpose of all wars, is peace.
The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.
Sin is its own punishment.
Never judge a philosophy by its abuse.
The argument is at an end.
Unless you believe, you will not understand.
Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.
Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfections.
What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.
Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.
God does not give heed to the ambitiousness of our prayers, because he is always ready to give to us his light, not a visible light but an intellectual and spiritual one; but we are not always ready to receive it when we turn aside and down to other things out of a desire for temporal things.
God is more truly imagined than expressed, and He exists more truly than He is imagined.
He that is kind is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.