Augustine Of Hippo Quotes

Biography

Type: Christian theologian

Born: Born: 13 November 354

Died: Died: 28 August 430

Augustine of Hippo was an early Christian theologian and philosopher whose writings influenced the development of Western Christianity and Western philosophy. He was the bishop of Hippo Regius (within modern-day Annaba, Algeria), located in Numidia (Roman province of Africa). Augustine is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers in Western Christianity for his writings in the Patristic Era. Among his most important works are "The City of God" and "Confessions".

Augustine Of Hippo Quotes

To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.

If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.

In my deepest wound I saw your glory, and it dazzled me.

I held my heart back from positively accepting anything, since I was afraid of another fall, and in this condition of suspense I was being all the more killed.

Our hearts have been made for you, O God, and they shall never rest until they rest in you.

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

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.

Yet we must say something when those who say the most are saying nothing.

Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.

Le bonheur, c'est continuer à désirer ce que l'on a déjà.

The throne of wisdom is the soul of the righteous, that is, wisdom sits on the soul of the righteous as on her chair, as on her throne, and there judges whatever she judges.

Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.

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.

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)

If you understood him, it would not be God.

We speak, but it is God who teaches.

What do I love when I love my God?

But if you do not wish to die of thirst in the desert, drink charity. This is the fountain the Lord has willed to place here, lest we faint on the way, and we shall drink it more abundantly when we come to the Fatherland.

Let the Lord your God be your hope – seek for nothing else from him, but let him himself be your hope. There are people who hope from him riches or perishable and transitory honours, in short they hope to get from God things which are not God himself.

Free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under Your Law.

I probably felt more resentment for what I personally was to suffer than for the wrong they were doing to anyone and everyone. But at that time I was determined not to put up with badly behaved people more out of my own interest than because I wanted them to become good people.

It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.

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

Hence, you see your faith, you see your doubt, you see your desire and will to learn, and when you are induced by divine authority to believe what you do not see, you see at one that you believe these things; you analyze and discern all this.

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]

Can human folly harbour a more arrogant or ungrateful thought than the notion that whereas God makes man beautiful in body, man makes himself pure in heart?

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.

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.

He loves Thee too little, who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake.

There are wolves within, and there are sheep without.

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.

The deformity of Christ forms you. If he had not willed to be deformed, you would not have recovered the form which you had lost. Therefore he was deformed when he hung on the cross. But his deformity is our comeliness. In this life, therefore, let us hold fast to the deformed Christ.

The reader of these reflections of mine on the Trinity should bear in mind that my pen is on the watch against the sophistries of those who scorn the starting-point of faith, and allow themselves to be deceived through an unseasonable and misguided love of reason.

When I come to be united to thee with all my being, then there will be no more pain and toil for me, and my life shall be a real life, being wholly filled by thee.

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

There are many going afar to marvel at the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movements of the stars, yet they leave themselves unnoticed!

it is a higher glory... to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with the sword, and to procure or maintain peace by peace, not by war.

What great good, then, we are to expect and hope from participating in his divinity, when even his distress calms us and his weakness strengthens us.

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.

How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose..! You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place.... O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation.

This, then, is true liberty: the joy that comes in doing what is right. At the same time, it is also devoted service in obedience to righteous precept.

When it happens that I am more moved by the song than the thing which is sung, I confess that I sin in a manner deserving punishment

A Christian should be an Alleluia from head to foot

Celui qui se perd dans sa passion perd moins que celui qui perd sa passion.

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

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.

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