Augustine Of Hippo Quotes

Faith is to believe what you do not yet see; the reward for this faith is to see what you believe.

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Sin is Energy in the wrong channel.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

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

— Augustine Of Hippo

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)

— Augustine Of Hippo

“If you keep silent, keep silent by love: if you speak, speak by love; if you correct, correct by love; if you pardon, pardon by love; let love be rooted in you, and from the root nothing but good can grow.
Love and do what you will.
Love endures in adversity, is moderate in prosperity; brave under harsh sufferings, cheerful in good works; utterly reliable in temptation, utterly open-handed in hospitality; as happy as can be among true brothers and sisters, as patient as you can get among the false one's.
The soul of the scriptures, the force of prophecy, the saving power of the sacraments, the fruit of faith, the wealth of the poor, the life of the dying.
Love is all.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“For you [God] are infinite and never change. In you 'today' never comes to an end: and yet our 'today' does come to an end in you, because time, as well as everything else, exists in you. If it did not, it would have no means of passing. And since your years never come to an end, for you they are simply 'today' ... But you yourself are eternally the same. In your 'today' you will make all that is to exist tomorrow and thereafter, and in your 'today' you have made all that existed yesterday and for ever before.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

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

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Man's maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother's breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; that Truth might be accused of false witnesses, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might grow weak; that the Healer might be wounded; that Life might die.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Every day my conscience makes confession relying on the hope of Your mercy as more to be trusted than its own innocence.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Love is ever new because it never groweth old.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“When I come across one or other of my fellow Christians ignorant of astronomy, believing what is not so, I calmly look on, not thinking him the worse for mistaking the place or order of created things, so long as he holds nothing demeaning to you, Lord, the creator of all those things. But he is worse off if he holds that his error is a matter of religious faith, and persists stubbornly in the error. His faith is still a weak thing in its cradle, needing the milk of a mothering love, until the youth grows up and cannot be the play-thing, any more, of every doctrinal wind that blows.
But one who ventures on the role of teacher, of leader and ruler of those under his spell, whose followers heed him not as a man only but as your very Spirit
what are we to make of him when he is caught purveying falsehoods? Should we not reject and despise such madness?”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Do not abandon what You have begun in me, but go on to perfect all that remains unfinished.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“No man can be a good bishop if he loves his title but not his task.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Pride is the beginning of sin. And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation - when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

Salvator ambulado. (It is solved by walking.)

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Is any man skillful enough to have fashioned himself?”

— Augustine Of Hippo

But what do I love, when I love You? Not beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time. Not the brightness of the light, so welcome to our eyes, Nor sweet melodies of varied songs, Nor the fragrant smell of flowers, and ointments and spices. Not manna and honey, nor the embrace of arms in fleshly pleasure. None of these I love when I love my God. Yet this love is a kind of light and melody and fragrance and meat and embrace. When I love my God, the light, melody, fragrance, meat, and embrace is experienced by my inner man. Love shines into my soul, where space cannot contain it. Love speaks with sound that does not fade into silence with time. Its smells are not dispersed in breath, and its tastes do not grow stale. Love clings, and its satisfaction does not break my connection to the experience. This is it which I love, when I love my God.

— Augustine Of Hippo

“He who created you without you will not justify you without you.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“What do you think you are doing by infesting the whole world? Because I do it with one puny boat, I am called a pirate; because you do it with a great fleet, you are called an emperor.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“What should you, O man, do, you who seek your own glory whenever you do anything good, while when you do something bad, you figure out ways to blame God.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

Clearly, it is a happier lot to be the slave of a man than of a lust:

— Augustine Of Hippo

Faith will falter if the authority of holy scripture is shaken; and if faith falters, love itself decays. For if someone lapses in his faith, he inevitably lapses in his love as well, since he cannot love what he does not believe to be true.

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Forgiveness is the remission of sins. For it is by this that what has been lost, and was found, is saved from being lost again.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“A wholesome fear would be a fit guardian for the citizens.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“They, then, who are destined to die, need not be careful to inquire what death they are to die, but into what place death will usher them.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

Our city must remember that in the ranks of its enemies, lie hid fellow citizens to be, and that it is well to bear with them until we can reach them in their profession of faith.

— Augustine Of Hippo

“When we transform our old life and give our spirit a new image, we find it hard and tiring to turn back from the darkness of earthly passions to the serene calm of the divine light. We thus ask God to help us that a complete conversion may be brought about in us.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Sin, but sin boldly.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

I understand that i understand

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Dai-me o que me ordenais, e ordenai-me o que quiserdes.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

Woe is me! how high art Thou in the highest, and how deep in the deepest! and Thou never departest, and we scarcely return to Thee.

— Augustine Of Hippo

“He who is filled with love is filled with God himself.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Nothing being less accordant with the nature of God than to cast off the government of the world, leaving it to chance, and so to wink at the crimes of men that they may wanton with impunity in evil courses; it follows, that every man who indulges in security, after extinguishing all fear of divine judgment, virtually denies that there is a God.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

He who has no tomb has the sky for his vault.

— Augustine Of Hippo

“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.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“They have only that power which the secret decree of the Almighty allots to them, in order that we may not set too great store by earthly prosperity,”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“People go to admire lofty mountains, and huge breakers at sea, and crashing waterfalls, and vast stretches of ocean, and the dance of the stars, but they leave themselves behind out of sight.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Nevertheless, lest the will itself should be deemed capable of doing any good thing without the grace of God, after saying, "His grace within me was not in vain, but I have laboured more abundantly than they all," he immediately added the qualifying clause, "Yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“How shall we be beautiful? By loving the One who is always beautiful. The more love grows in you, the more beauty grows: for love itself is the beauty of the soul.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“The soul is not moved to abandon higher things and love inferior things unless it wills to do so.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Let him love to find You while not finding it out, rather than, while finding it out, not to find You.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

Now in my opinion it is certainly a complete mistake to suppose that no narrative of events in this type of literature has any significance beyond the purely historical record; but it is equally rash to maintain that every single statement in those books is a complex of allegorical meanings. That

— Augustine Of Hippo

“The mode of ascertaining the proper meaning, and the mode of making known the meaning when it is ascertained.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Take up and read, take up and read.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

The dominion of good men is profitable, not so much for themselves as for human affairs. But the dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater licence in wickedness;

— Augustine Of Hippo

For often we wickedly blind ourselves to the occasions of teaching and admonishing them, sometimes even of reprimanding and chiding them, either because we shrink from the labor or are ashamed to offend them, or because we fear to lose good friendships,

— Augustine Of Hippo

I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and safety I hated, and a way without snares.

— Augustine Of Hippo

“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?”

— Augustine Of Hippo

The soul which is led by God and His wisdom, rather than by bodily concupiscence, will certainly never consent to the desire aroused in its own flesh by another's lust.

— Augustine Of Hippo