Augustine Of Hippo Quotes

There are wolves within, and there are sheep without.

What, then, is the God I worship? He can be none but the Lord God himself, for who but the Lord is God? What other refuge can there be, except our God?

What do I love when I love my 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.

Our whole business therefore in this life is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.

The good man is free, even if he is a slave. The evil man is a slave, even if he is a king.

My sin grew sleek on my excesses.

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)

I cannot grasp all that I am.

For no sin is committed save by that desire or will by which we desire that it be well with us, and shrink from it being ill with us. That, therefore, is a lie which we do in order that it may be well with us, but which makes us more miserable than we were. And why is this, but because the source of man's happiness lies only in God, whom he abandons when he sins, and not in himself, by living according to whom he sins?

Thy purpose unchanged; receivest again what Thou findest, yet didst never lose; never in need, yet rejoicing in gains;

When men do what is displeasing to God, they perform their own will, not God's.

See, heaven and earth exist, they cry aloud that they are made, for they suffer change and variation.

For such is the depth of the Christian Scriptures that, even if I were attempting to study them and nothing else, from boyhood to decrepit old age, with the utmost leisure, the most unwearied zeal, and with talents greater than I possess, I would still be making progress in discovering their treasures.

But he does not enter into temptation if he conquers his evil concupiscence by good will. And yet the determination of the human will is insufficient, unless the Lord grant it victory in answer to prayer that it enter not into temptation. What, indeed, affords clearer evidence of the grace of God than the acceptance of prayer in any petition?

Indeed we also work, but we are only collaborating with God who works, for his mercy has gone before us. It has gone before us so that we may be healed, and follows us so that once healed, we may be given life; it goes before us so that we may be called, and follows us so that we may be glorified; it goes before us so that we may live devoutly, and follows us so that we may always live with God: for without him we can do nothing.

He used to say that it was no wonder if from the human soul, by some higher instinct that does not know what goes on within itself, some utterance emerges not by art but by 'chance' which is in sympathy with the affairs or actions of the inquirer.7

What then, is correctness of speech but the maintenance of the practice of others, as established by the authority of ancient speakers? But the weaker men are, the more they are troubled by such matters. Their weakness stems from a desire to appear learned, not with a knowledge of things, by which we are edified, but with a knowledge of signs, by which it is difficult not to be puffed up in some way; even a knowledge of things often makes people boastful, unless their necks are held down by the Lord's yoke.

O highest and best, most powerful, most all-powerful, most merciful and most just, most deeply hidden and most nearly present, most beautiful and most strong, constant yet incomprehensible, changeless yet changing all things, never new, never old, making all things new, bringing the proud to decay and they know it not: always acting and always at rest, still gathering yet never wanting; upholding, filling and protecting, creating, nourishing, and bringing to perfection; seeking, although in need of nothing. You love, but with no storm of passion; you are jealous, but with no anxious fear; you repent, but do not grieve; in your anger calm; you change your works, but never change your plan; you take back what you find and yet have never lost; never in need, you are yet glad of gain; never greedy, yet still demanding profit on your loans; to be paid in excess, so that you may be the debtor, and yet who has anything which is not yours? You pay back debts which you never owed and cancel debts without losing anything.

If you understood him, it would not be God.

Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.

God. For they had not the insight to see that I might put the lessons which they forced me to learn to any other purpose than the satisfaction of man's insatiable desire for the poverty he calls wealth and the infamy he knows as fame.

Thou gavest; and to my nurses willingly to give me what Thou gavest them. For they, with a heaven-taught affection, willingly gave me what they abounded with from Thee.

He is Thy best servant who looks not so much to hear that from Whee which himself willeth, as rather to will that, which from Thee he heareth.

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.

I was inflamed to love, and seek, and obtain, and hold, and embrace, not some sect, but wisdom itself-whatever it was.

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.

My questioning was my attentive spirit,
and their reply, their beauty.

True inner righteousness does not judge according to custom but by the measure of the most perfect law of God Almighty by which the mores of various places and times were adapted to those places and times.

He cannot have God for his Father who will not have the Church for his mother.

Day after day I postponed living in you, but I never put off the death which I died each day in myself. I longed for a life of happiness but I was frightened to approach it in its own domain; and yet, while I fled from it, I still searched for it.

There is more than one way of sacrificing to the rebel angels.

You never depart from us, but yet, only with difficulties do we return to You.

Our hearts were made for You, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in you." -St. Augustine of Hippo

Between temporal and eternal things there is this difference: a temporal thing is loved more before we have it, and it begins to grow worthless when we gain it, for it does not satisfy the soul, whose true and certain rest is eternity; but the eternal is more ardently loved when it is acquired than when it is merely desired.

But be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind; not now after your kind, as though following your neighbour who went before you, nor as living after the example of some better man (for Thou saidst not, "Let man be made after his kind," but, Let us make man after our own image and similitude), that

To spare the conquered, and beat down the proud.

In faith, unity, in doubtful matters, liberty, in all things charity.

The mind commands the body, and obedience is instant; the mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind tells the hand to move, and all goes so smoothly that it is hard to distinguish the command from its execution. Yet the mind is the mind, and the hand is a body. The mind tells the mind to will; one is the same as the other, and yet it does not do what it is told.

Though I was retreating from the Truth, I appeared to myself to be going toward it because I did not yet know that evil with nothing but the privation of good.

In this wicked world, and in these evil times, the Church through her present humiliation is preparing for future exaltation. She is being trained by the stings of fear, the tortures of sorrow, the distresses of hardship, and the dangers of temptation; and she rejoices only in expectation, when her joy is wholesome. In this situation, many reprobates are mingled in the Church with the good, and both sorts are collected as it were in the dragnet of the gospel;228 and in this world, as in a sea, both kinds swim without separation, enclosed in nets until the shore is reached. There the evil are to be divided from the good; and among the good, as it were in his temple, 'God will be all in all.

Why, therefore, do we delay to abandon our hopes of this world, and give ourselves wholly to seek after God and the blessed life? But

Woe to my proud soul, which hoped that if it fell away from you, it would have something better! It turned and turned again upon its back and sides and belly, but all places were hard to it, for you alone are rest.

266. "Faith is to believe what we do not see; and the reward of the faith is to see what we believe.

Divides into three classes,
things to be enjoyed, things to be used, and things which use and enjoy.

An unjust law is no law at all.

It is not without significance that Hebrew was the language used by Abraham, and that he could not hand it on to all his descendants but only to those who were derived from him through Jacob, and by uniting to form the people of God in the most evident and conspicuous fashion, were able to keep the covenants and to preserve the stock from which Christ came. And

With what destination in mind are you walking, endlessly, endlessly, on those hard paths of suffering? There's no rest where you're looking for it. Look for what you're looking for--but it's not there where you're looking. You're seeking a happy life in a land of death. It's not there. How can there be a happy life where there isn't even life?

The weakness then of infant limbs, not its will, is its innocence.

No eulogy is due to a man who simply does his duty and nothing more.

There is a joy that brings true happiness, but it is not given to the ungodly. It is only for those who love You for Your own sake. That joy is to know You as You are. This is the happy life, to rejoice in You, of You, and for You.

Those who ask 'What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?' are still steeped in error which they should have discarded.

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.

God provides the wind, Man must raise the sail.

My God, how I burned, how I burned with longing to leave earthly and fly back to you.

I will plant my feet on that step where my parents put me as a child, until self-evident truth comes to light.

He is not rightly touched, that is to say, in any other way He is not rightly believed on. But Mary might have still so believed as to account Him unequal with the Father, and this certainly is forbidden her by the words, "Touch me not;" that is, Believe not thus on me according to thy present notions; let not your thoughts stretch outwards to what I have been made in thy behalf, without passing beyond to that whereby thou hast thyself been made.

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

These were Homer's fictions; he transfers things human to the gods. I could have wished him to transfer divine things to us." [173] But it would have been more true had he said: "These are, indeed, his fictions, but he attributed divine attributes to sinful men, that crimes might not be accounted crimes, and that whosoever committed any might appear to imitate the celestial gods and not abandoned men.

Thou madest him, but sin in him Thou madest not.

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.

Sin is Energy in the wrong channel.

If, on the contrary, they hear from you about themselves, they will be in no position to say, "The Lord is lying." Is hearing the truth about oneself from you anything different from knowing oneself? And can anyone have this self-knowledge and still protest, "It is not true," unless he himself is lying?

It is my faith that calls to you, Lord, the faith which you gave me and made to live in me through the merits of your Son, who became man, and through the ministry of your preacher.

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.

It's not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds.

There could be nothing more fortunate for human affairs than that by the mercy of God they who are endowed with true piety of life if they have the skill for ruling people should also have the power.

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.

What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.

Though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference in what they both suffer. For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked.

What did it profit that I read the greatest human ideas of the so-called "liberal arts" in the books I got hold of. My thinking was enslaved to corrupt desires, so what difference did it make that I could read and understand these books? I delighted in learning, but I had no divine context for what my mind picked up. I had no foundation to discern what is true or certain. I was standing with my back to the light, so that the things that should be illuminated were in shadow, even though they were in front of my face.

I fell away from you, my God, and I went astray, too far astray from you, the support of my youth, and I became to myself a land of want.

Tell me, in the name of your mercies, you, Master, who are my God, what you are to me. Say to my soul, 'I myself am your rescue.' Say it in such a way that I hear it. Here before you are the ears with which my heart hears, Master. Open them and say to my soul, 'I myself am your rescue.' I will run after the sound of your voice and lay hold of you. Do not hide your face from me. Let me die, to keep from dying, and let me see your face.

Trust the past to God's mercy, the present to God's love, and the future to God's providence.

The earthly [city] has made for herself, according to her heart's desire, false gods out of any sources at all, even out of human beings, that she might adore them with sacrifices. The heavenly one, on the other hand, living like a wayfarer in this world, makes no false gods for herself. On the contrary, she herself is made by the true God that she may be herself a true sacrifice to Him.

What is pride but an appetite for inordinate exaltation? Now, exaltation is inordinate when the soul cuts itself off from the very Source to which it should keep close and somehow makes itself and becomes an end to itself.

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 ...

Love is ever new because it never groweth old.

This joy in God is not like any pleasure found in physical or intellectual satisfaction. Nor is it such as a friend experiences in the presence of a friend. But, if we are to use any such analogy, it is more like the eye rejoicing in light.

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?

He that is jealous is not in love.

Thus, little by little, I became conscious where I was; and to have a wish to express my wishes to those who could content them, and I could not; for the wishes were within me, and they without; nor could they by any sense of theirs enter within my spirit. So I flung about at random limbs and voice, making the few signs I could, and such as I could, like, though in truth very little like, what I wished.

The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.

A Christian should be an Alleluia from head to foot

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to permit no evil to exist.

Miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature.

If we are wayfarers who want to return home, then we must see the world as a means of transportation (terestibus vel marinis vehiculis) and always remember to distinguish the means and ends.

For a possession which is not diminished by being shared with others, if it is possessed and not shared, is not yet possessed as it ought to be possessed. The Lord saith

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?

186. " I never have any difficulty believing in miracles, since I experienced the miracle of change in my own heart." ~

The truth is like a lion; you don't have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.

The past times that you think were good, are good because they are not yours here and now.

still the teachings of the philosophers are not the commandments of the gods, but the discoveries of men, who, at the prompting of their own speculative ability, made efforts to discover the hidden laws of nature, and the right and wrong in ethics, and in dialectic what was consequent according to the rules of logic, and what was inconsequent and erroneous.

Moral character is assessed not by what a man knows but by what he loves

God has promised forgiveness to your repentance, but He has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination.

Whither do I call Thee, since I am in Thee? or whence canst Thou enter into

Really great things, when discussed by little men, can usually make such men grow big.

No one should be ashamed to admit that they do not know what they do not know, in case while feigning knowledge, they come to deserve to never know.

Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.

I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love ... I sought what I might love, in love with loving.