Quotes from Saint Augustine

Too late I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Too late I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.

Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.

The weakness of little children's limbs is innocent, not their souls.

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.

Take up, read! Take up, read!

What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.

The purpose of all wars, is peace.

Hear the other side.

I was in love with loving.

The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.

He that is jealous is not in love.

I would not have believed the gospel had not the authority of the Church moved me.

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.

Give me chastity and continence, but not just now.

To Carthage I came, where all about me resounded a caldron of dissolute loves.

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.

In the usual course of study I had come to a book of a certain Cicero.

O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.

Our time for this life is nothing other than a race to death.

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.

The most glorious city of God.

For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?

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.

A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.