Famous Quotes

Quotes by Saint Augustine

• Beauty is indeed a good gift of God but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.
• Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.
• Faith is to believe what you do not see the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.
• Find out how much God has given you and from it take what you need the remainder is needed by others.
• 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.
• God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering.
• God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.
• God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.
• He that is jealous is not in love.
• In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?
• Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.
• It was pride that changed angels into devils it is humility that makes men as angels.
• Love is the beauty of the soul.
• Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
• Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.
• My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is.
• O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.
• Our bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are a working out of the processes of creation. All our ambitions and intelligence are beside that great elemental point.
• Patience is the companion of wisdom.
• Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.
• Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.
• The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.
• The purpose of all wars, is peace.
• The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
• Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full, that thou mayest be filled with that whereof thou art empty.
• What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.
• What I needed most was to love and to be loved, eager to be caught. Happily I wrapped those painful bonds around me and sure enough, I would be lashed with the red-hot pokers or jealousy, by suspicions and fear, by burst of anger and quarrels.
• What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
• Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul? Man is a great depth, O Lord. The hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feeling, the movements of his heart.