Saint Augustine Quotes
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Everyone who observes himself doubting observes a truth, and about that which he observes he is certain; therefore he is certain about a truth. Everyone therefore who doubts whether truth exists has in himself a truth on which not to doubt.... Hence one who can doubt at all ought not to doubt the existence of truth.
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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.
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The entire most beautiful order of things that are very good, when their measures have been accomplished, is to pass away.
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Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.
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It is impossible that there should be inhabitants on the opposite side of the Earth, since no such race is recorded by Scripture among the descendants of Adam.
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The one who is our very Life descended into our world, and bore our death, and slew it with the abundance of His own life. Thundering, He called out to us to return to Him in heaven.
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The good Christian should beware the mathematician and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell.
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What is held by the whole Church, and that not as instituted by Councils, but as a matter of invariable custom, is rightly held to have been handed down by authority.
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Let him who desires to be harsh in making demands upon his debtors consider that he is God’s debtor.
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It is not with respect to our convenience or discomfort, but with respect to their own nature that the creatures are glorifying to their Artificer.
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For God loves saving, not condemning, and therefore He is patient with bad people, in order to make good people out of bad people.
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My mother spoke of Christ to my father, by her feminine and childlike virtues, and, after having borne his violence without a murmur or complaint, gained him at the close of his life to Christ.
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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.
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They the hazers or eversores were rightly called Overturners, since they had themselves been first overturned and perverted, tricked by those same devils who were secretly mocking them in the very acts by which they amused themselves in mocking and making fools of others.
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Blessed is he who devotes his life to great and noble ends, and who forms his well-considered plans with deliberate wisdom.
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Take care of your body as if you were going to live forever; and take care of your soul as if you were going to die tomorrow.
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Why is it that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would by no means suffer?
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To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension of eternal things; to knowledge, the rational knowledge of temporal things.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.
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Just think of the illimitable abundance and the marvelous loveliness of light, or of the beauty of the sun and moon and stars.
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By the fall a poison was handed to mankind through a woman [Eve], by the Redemption man was given salvation also through a woman [Mary].