Saint Augustine Quotes
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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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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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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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All the dancer's gestures are signs of things, and the dance called rational, because it aptly signifies and displays something over and above the pleasure of the senses.
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He who commends the nature of the soul as the supreme good, and condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, at once both carnally desires the soul, and carnally flies the flesh, because he feels thus from human vanity, not from divine truth.
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We take for granted the slow miracle whereby water in the irrigation of a vineyard becomes wine. It is only when Christ turns water into wine, in a quick motion, as it were, that we stand amazed.
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God Almighty would in no way permit evil in His works were He not so omnipotent and good that even out of evil He could work good.
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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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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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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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If there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, then truth itself is God.
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You have found that you were more secure before you accumulated so much. See what greed has imposed on you: You have filled your house and now you fear burglars. You have hoarded money and lost sleep. See what greed has commanded you: "Do this!" And you did it.
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Love and do what you want. If you stop talking, you will stop talking with love; if you shout, you will shout with love; if you correct, you will correct with love.
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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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God has promised forgiveness to your repentance, but He has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination.
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Why persist in walking difficult and toilsome paths? There is no repose where you are seeking it. Search as you like, it is not where you are looking. You are seeking a happy life in the realm of death, and it will not be found there. How could life be happy where there is no life at all?
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That your enemies have been created is God's doing; that they hate you and wish to ruin you is their own doing. What should you say about them in your mind? "Lord be merciful to them, forgive them their sins, put the fear of God in them, change them!" You are loving in them not what they are, but what you would have them to become.
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It was in His flesh that Christ walked among us and it is His flesh that He has given us to eat for our salvation; but no one eats of this flesh without having first adored it . . . and not only do we not sin in thus adoring it, but we would be sinning if we did not do so.
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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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Ninety percent of the time things turn out worse than you thought they would. The other ten percent of the time you had no right to expect that much.
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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].
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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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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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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.