Quotes About Augustine

#1. For many people, feminism is one of those words of which, as St. Augustine said about time, they know the meaning as long as no one is asking.

Katha Pollitt

#2. Augustine does not disagree with this when he teaches that it is a faculty of the reason and the will to choose good with the assistance of grace; evil, when grace is absent.

John Calvin

#3. 24 THE MEASURE OF LOVE The measure of love is to love without measure. - attributed to Saint Augustine The

Cassandra Clare

#4. St. Augustine referred to the restlessness in every human being that is satisfied only in God.

Betty Malz

#5. This is a helpful working definition of pride. Pride is thinking much about one's self and much of one's self. To borrow words from Augustine, pride is "the love of self, even to the contempt of God."30

Brian G. Hedges

#6. Hence we should all make St. Augustine's prayer our own: "Lord, here cut, here burn and spare me not, but spare me in eternity!

Alfonso Maria De Liguori

#7. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they probably did not fall into a state of original sin, as Saint Augustine believed, but into an agrarian economy.

Karen Armstrong

#8. Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them.

Joni Mitchell

#9. Again, I hear almost everyday from atheists who write off religion as primitive, premodern nonsense. I summon Aquinas, Augustine, Paul [of Tarsus], Teresa of Avila, Joseph Ratzinger, and Edith Stein-in all their intellectual rigor-as allies in the the struggle against this dismissive atheism.

Robert Barron

#10. One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans ... read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa.

D.H. Lawrence

#11. Augustine said he wept more for the death of Dido than he did for the death of his own saviour. What about Book Four, the best book of the best poem of the best poet?

Boris Johnson

#12. Faith is to believe that which you do not yet see; and the reward of this faith is to see that which you believe. - Saint Augustine of Hippo P.g64

Rhonda Byrne

#13. (When someone asked Augustine what God was doing before creation, he replied that God was making hell for people who ask silly questions.)

N. T. Wright

#14. I would inquire of reasonable persons whether this principle: Matter is naturally wholly incapable of thought, and this other: I think, therefore I am, are in fact the same in the mind of
Descartes, and in that of St. Augustine, who said the same thing twelve hundred years before.

Blaise Pascal

#15. I have become an enigma to myself. So said Saint Augustine. And herein lies my sickness.

Don DeLillo

#16. The things we love individually not only determine our character, but what a society loves collectively shapes its culture. This latter idea was the heart of Augustine's great work City of God. He believed societies are the mutual associations of individuals united by what they love in common.

Timothy J. Keller

#17. Saint Augustine once admonished that we should never use the truth to injure. I believe there are dark and uncertain moments in our lives when it's not wrong for each of us to feel that he wrote those words especially for us.

James Lee Burke

#18. For Augustine, that's the crucial change. Knowledge is not enough for tranquillity and goodness, because it doesn't contain the motivation to be good. Only love impels action. We don't become better because we acquire new information. We become better because we acquire better loves.

David Brooks

#19. All writers of confessions from Augustine on down, have always remained a little in love with their sins.

Anatole France

#20. St. Augustine adds that God has taught us to praise Him, in the Psalms, not in order that He may get something out of this praise, but in order that we may be made better by it.

Thomas Merton

#21. Saint Augustine said that the New Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old is revealed in the New.

Scott Hahn

#22. Augustine wrote that God sometimes does not give us what we ask in prayer. Of His bounty, the Lord often grants not what we seek, so as to bestow something preferable.

Lauren F. Winner

#23. The 'words' of Augustine, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, St. John of Damascus, St. Thomas Aquinas, et al, may not have carried the weight of Canon, however they were neither paper-like nor mere 'pellets'."

~R. Alan Woods [2012]

R. Alan Woods

#24. 432In the end, grace may prove irresistible, but love can never be forced. Augustine knew this.

James Wetzel

#25. Augustine said it best: You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

Charles Martin

#26. The scripture comes gently, as a mother comes to her child, so that we who can scarcely crawl on the ground are not left alone in our weakness." (Augustine)

Bengt R. Hoffman

#27. Did a Magdalene, a Paul, a Constantine, an Augustine become mountains of ice after their conversion? Quite the contrary. We should never have had these prodigies of conversion and marvelous holiness if they had not changed the flames of human passion into volcanoes of immense love of God.

Frances Xavier Cabrini

#28. I was angry at myself for my inclination to vice. I longed for the day when a state of frenzy would lead my mind to sober pasture, just as it had for Saint Augustine. I longed for the day when the love of one woman would be sacred enough to forget all the rest.

Roman Payne

#29. Augustine's Confessions ... "What it is, therefore," he begins, "that goes on within the soul, since it takes greater delight if things that it loves are found or restored to it than if it had always possessed them?

Philip Yancey

#30. Augustine's lips tense into a line. "Oh, for the gods' sakes, Little Jac," he snaps. "We know Lucent wasn't just your riding companion." At her stunned expression, Augustine laughs. "You are good at many things, but you are horrible at keeping your love interests a secret.

Marie Lu

#31. Yet we flatter our strength unduly when we compare it even to a reed stick! For whatever vain men devise and babble concerning these matters is but smoke. Therefore Augustine with good reason often repeats the famous statement that free will is by its defenders more trampled down than strengthened.

John Calvin

#32. Before deciding what to do about national space policy, Obama set up an outside review panel of space experts, headed up by my friend Norm Augustine, former head of Lockheed Martin and a former government official.

Buzz Aldrin

#33. O, because I have had only that kind of benevolence which consists in lying on a sofa, and cursing the church and clergy for not being martyrs and confessors. One can see, you know, very easily, how others ought to be martyrs.
-Augustine St. Clare

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#34. God in heaven will hear your prayers, and will answer them. He has never failed, if a man has been honest in his petitions and honest in his confessions. Let your faith beget patience. God is never in a hurry, said St. Augustine, because He has all eternity to work.

D.L. Moody

#35. Augustine started from God's grace and got it right, Pelagius started from human effort and got it wrong. Augustine passionately pursued God; Pelagius methodically worked to please God.

Philip Yancey

#36. No one can act outside of God's sovereign will or against it. Centuries ago, Augustine said, "Nothing, therefore, happens unless the Omnipotent wills it to happen: he either permits it to happen, or he brings it about himself."5

Jerry Bridges

#37. 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. - Saint Augustine

Augustine Of Hippo

#38. Augustine's final verdict on the philosophers of Greece
and Rome was that, although they had made various mistakes, "nature itself has not permitted them to wander too far from the path of truth" in their judgments about the supreme good (De Civitate Dei 19.1).

Alasdair MacIntyre

#39. Saint Augustine ... insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.

Karen Armstrong

#40. Everything that the Bible identifies as sin and our nature recognizes as such is something essentially good gone wrong. More precisely, it is something God has made that we have corrupted. Augustine defined the essence of sin as being curved in on ourselves

Michael S. Horton

#41. That which man builds man destroys, but the city of God is built by God and cannot be destroyed by man. AUGUSTINE

Charles W. Colson

#42. History is never something carved in stone, but more like something saved to a temporary cache file on a computer disk vulnerable to the imperfections of memory and always ready to be revised.
The Confessions are Augustine's own first draft of history.

James O'Donnell

#43. Remember, Monsieur, that Saint Augustine says that a person who does not obey the doctors is doing his best to kill himself.

Vincent De Paul

#44. You fascinate me." Chris leaned away so he could see her face. "How so?" "You quote Augustine, and you make an awesome campfire. You carry a rosary in your pocket, and you're going to work at a brewery. You're a virgin, and you ride a Harley.

Carolyn Astfalk

#45. Catholics have seldom had the difficulties and embarrassments many Protestants have had about creation vs. evolution. Ever since Augustine, they have interpreted Genesis' "days" non-literally.

Peter Kreeft

#46. Miracles do not happen in contradiction to nature, but only in contradiction to what is known in nature. - St. AUGUSTINE, LATIN PHILOSOPHER AND THEOLOGIAN

Pam Grout

#47. Human personality is created with the restless yearning for communion with the unseen but present personal God (Augustine, Conf. 1.1).

Thomas C. Oden

#48. Augustine insisted that this longing is as true for Christ-followers as it is for anyone else: "If I should ask you why you believe in Christ, and why you have become Christians, every man will answer truthfully by saying: for the sake of a happy life.

Randy Alcorn

#49. Whether it is Paul defending Judaism, Augustine pursing philosophical learnedness, Luther attempting complete ritual self-abasement, each finally realized he had given himself to secular forms of self-salvation and to a world filled with human achievement but empty of God.

William Dean

#50. no man is the slave either of another man or of sin": Augustine, City of God 19.15, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 943.

Andy Crouch

#51. But the one counsel he did give me is something that I will not easily forget: There are many beautiful mystical books written by the Christians. You should read St. Augustine's Confessions, and The Imitation of Christ

Thomas Merton

#52. St. Augustine accepted a date of about 5000 B.C. for the Creation of the universe according to the book of Genesis. (It is interesting that this is not so far from the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 B.C., which is when archaeologists tell us that civilization really began.)

Stephen Hawking

#53. St Augustine says: 'The true servant of God does not desire to be told or to be given what they would like to hear or see, for their prime and highest wish is to hear what is most pleasing to God.'3

Meister Eckhart

#54. To borrow the language of Augustine, God is not only superior summo meo
beyond my utmost heights
but also interior intimo meo
more inward to me than my inmost depths.

David Bentley Hart

#55. Holy Christendom has, in my judgment, no better teacher after the apostles than St. Augustine.

Martin Luther

#56. Solvitur ambulando, St. Augustine said. It is solved by walking.

Laura Kelly

#57. We mustn't allow our circumstances and disappointments to become the excuse for the choices we make in life. God is greater than all of that, and He can bring beauty out of ashes. Our trials come, Augustine said, to prove us and to improve us.

Alistair Begg

#58. I'm in a Disney movie. - Augustine

Ilona Andrews

#59. Here was St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States. How to build a hotel to meet the requirements of nineteenth century America and have it in keeping with the character of the place ? that was my hardest problem.

Henry Flagler

#60. All the good writers of confessions, from Augustine onwards, are men who are still a little in love with their sins.

Anatole France

#61. St. Augustine wrote something once, something I think about often," he said. " 'God triumphs on the ruins of our plans.' And maybe that is what is happening here. We make blunders, we make mistakes, and somehow new doors open, new possibilities arise, opportunities of which we've never dreamed.

Anne Rice

#62. Augustine was struck by the fact, when they first met, that Ambrose read to himself, a habit unknown to the classical world: 'His eyes scanned the page, and his mind penetrated its meaning, but his voice and tongue were silent.' There were other impressive things about Ambrose.

Paul Johnson

#63. Sounds a little like my quote for the week. Do you want to hear it? This is by Augustine: O soul, He only who created thee can satisfy thee. If thou ask for anything else, it is thy misfortune, for He alone made thee in His image can satisfy thee. That's rich, isn't it?

Robin Jones Gunn

#64. Time takes no holiday. It does not roll idly by, but through our senses works its own wonders in the mind. Time came and went from one day to the next; in its coming and its passing it brought me other hopes and other memories. [quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 54]

Augustine Of Hippo

#65. This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of "memory," not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing.

Richard Rohr

#66. Loving difficult people will refine us. Perhaps only in heaven will our love be so perfected that we can actually like these people, too. St. Augustine spoke of a man who, on earth, had chronic gas problems; in heaven, his flatulence became perfect music.

Scott Hahn

#67. In The City of God Augustine says: "The will, therefore, is then truly free, when it is not the slave of vices and sins. Such was it given us by God; and this being lost by its own fault, can only be restored by Him who was able at first to give it.

R.C. Sproul

#68. As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: "What did God do before he created the universe?" Augustine didn't reply: "He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions.

Stephen Hawking

#69. The big, blazing truth about man is that he has a heaven-sized hole in his heart, and nothing else can fill it. We pass our lives trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles. As Augustine said: Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.

Peter Kreeft

#70. Not every religion has to have St. Augustine's attitude to sex. Why even in our culture marriages are celebrated in a church, everyone present knows what is going to happen that night, but that doesn't prevent it being a religious ceremony.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#71. In any case, the life of a drunk is presumably livelier than that of the ordinary well-behaved citizen. And then - I read that once somewhere - the life of a hedonist is the best preparation for becoming a mystic.
People like St. Augustine are always the ones that become visionaries.

Hermann Hesse

#72. I am convinced with Plato , with St. Paul, with St. Augustine, with Calvin , and with Leibnitz, that this universe, and every smallest portion of it, exactly fulfils the purpose for which Almighty God designed it.

James Anthony Froude

#73. Christians have inherited from Saint Augustine and from Plato the vision of this transient world as an icon of another and changeless order. They understand the sacred as a revelation in the here and now of the eternal sense of our being.

Roger Scruton

#74. Just as truly as the Confessions are the autobiography of St. Augustine, The City of God is the autobiography of the Church written by the most Catholic of her great saints.

Augustine Of Hippo

#75. We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

Alain De Botton

#76. The Jews were, as he (Augustine) put it, the living letters of the Law, that they were a constant reminder of the love of God to His chosen people, and that they were a constant reminder that Christ would be returning.

Thomas F. Madden

#77. The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not - which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams.

Carl Jung

#78. We were born in a Jewish world, as part of a Jewish faith tradition. We had to translate ourselves into the neo-Platonic thinking Greek world; that took us about 400 years. Then, finally a man named Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, recast Christianity in terms of neo-Platonic thought.

John Shelby Spong

#79. If God meant woman to rule over man, He would have taken her out of Adam's head. Had He designed her to be his slave, He would have taken her out of his feet. But God took woman out of man's side, for He made her to be a helpmate and an equal to him. - Augustine

Michael O'Donnell

#80. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas).

Sam Harris

#81. Though many intellectuals, following in the footsteps of Saints Augustine and Jerome, hold business people in contempt for their selfishness and greed, in fact a free market puts a premium on empathy.

Steven Pinker

#82. The truth can be perceived only through thinking, as is proven by Augustine.

Thomas Aquinas

#83. The church is a whore, but she is still my mother. Augustine

Matt Chandler

#84. I am in a sorry state, for I do not even know what I do not know. - St. Augustine

John Dufresne

#85. The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes; that is the
secret of fascination. And in his book, St Augustine does not doubt the
reality of this fascination for one moment.

Antonin Artaud

#86. Some Christians believe the harder that one thinks, the colder faith will grow. Augustine grew more brilliant as he grew more pious, more creative as he became more orthodox. His period of heresy was imitative, but his traditional Christianity took mental risks.

John Mark Reynolds

#87. Augustine writes: "We love God, therefore, for what He is in Himself, and [we love] ourselves and our neighbors for His sake." That

Timothy J. Keller

#88. What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered, Augustine said.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#89. Give me chastity and constancy, but not yet." St. Augustine. "Amen" Odette

Marie Clair

#90. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ' an unjust law is no law at all.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#91. Things take the time they take.
Don't worry.
How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?

Mary Oliver

#92. He [Augustine] admitted: 'I am the sort of man who writes because he has made progress, and who makes progress by writing.'

Paul Johnson

#93. He who knows how to pray well, knows how to live well. - St. Augustine

David N. Calvillo

#94. In the time of to Augustine, the conversation in the West mostly had been a Christian reaction to outside ideas. After Augustine, the Great Conversation would be about his ideas for centuries.

John Mark Reynolds

#95. The study of God requires intellectual effort, historical imagination, empathic energy, and participation in a vital community of prayer (Augustine, Answer to Skeptics).

Thomas C. Oden

#96. What kind of ethical philosophy is it that condemns every child, even before it is born, to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor? Augustine,

Richard Dawkins

#97. Augustine in City of God pictures a resurrection in which the bodily systems we no longer need to protect ourselves can use energy to praise God.

Matt Chandler

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

Augustine Of Hippo

#99. 'You told me, Father, that after my past life it is still possible to become another St. Augustine. I don't doubt it, and today more than yesterday I want to try to prove it.' But you have to cut out sin courageously from the root, as the holy Bishop of Hippo did.

Josemaria Escriva

#100. Kept talking about how she's studying every holy book she can get her hands on, aiming to understand God's word. I quoted St. Augustine to her. 'If you understand it, it isn't God.' Gave her a cup of chamomile tea.

Jeanne DuPrau