Inspirational Quotes by Augustine

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

“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.”

“God bids you not to commit lechery, that is, not to have sex with any woman except your wife. You ask of 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.”

“What do I love when I love my God?”

“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)”

“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.”

“God grants us not always what we ask so as to bestow something preferable.”

“Even the straws under my knees shout to distract me from prayer”

“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.”

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].”

“Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he lives so as to make happiness impossible.”

“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.”

“All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The happy life is this - to rejoice to thee, in thee, and for thee.”

“Augustine taught that true freedom is not choice or lack of constraint, but being what you are meant to be. Humans were created in the image of God. True freedom, then, is not found in moving away from that image but only in living it out.”

“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.”