Quotes About Augustine

The Heavenly City outshines Rome," Augustine wrote. "There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of life, eternity.

Saint Augustine consolingly codified unhappiness as an immutable feature of existence, part of the wretchedness of man's situation, and poured scorn on all those theories by which men have tried hard to build up joy for themselves within the misery of this life.

For most of its existence, Christianity has been the most intolerant of world faiths, doing its best to eliminate all competitors, with Judaism a qualified exception, for which (thanks to some thoughts from Augustine of Hippo) it found space to serve its own theological and social purposes.

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

Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.

We were like St. Augustine's definition of time: "Out of the future that is not yet, into the present that is just becoming, back to the past that no longer is.

As Augustine pointed out in his Confessions, the basic Christian message is so simple that it can easily be grasped by children, while its theological ramifications are sufficient to challenge the most powerful intellects.

This 'shocking realism'52 has often surprised and upset Augustine's readers. But, given the immense authority of the writer, this view shaped Christian political sensibilities ever after: Christian writers could not condemn suggestions for liberalizing the state, or even for dispensing with monarchies. Moreover, by affirming the secularity of kingship the Church made it possible to examine the basis for worldly power and the interplay of rights and rule.

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.

Is it not lack of faith that leads men to fear the scrutiny of reason? If the destination is doubtful, than the path must be fraught with fear. A robust faith need not fear, for if God exists, then reason cannot help but lead us to Him. Cogito, ergo Deus est,'says St. Augustine, I think, therefore God is.

The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.— Saint Augustine

According to Augustine, "Eve borrowed sin from the devil and wrote a bill and provided a surety, and the interest on the debt was heaped upon posterity. . . . She wrote the bill when she reached out her hand to the forbidden apple." And in the end, adds the Golden Legend, "Christ took this bill and nailed it to the cross.

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.

It irked St Augustine (CG, 6, 4, 1-2) that Varro put human affairs before divine ones, for - the Latin antiquary explained - cities had existed before religious institutions, 'as the artist exists before the picture and the architect before the building'. Such an attitude was typical of a Roman, for whom religion was not a matter of personal devotion, but concerned a collective interest.

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?

All men want peace but, as St. Augustine remarked, they want it on their own terms; hence the prevalence of wars. It is doubtful if anyone ever brought about peace simply by being for it or prevented war by being against war as such. On the contrary, turning peace into a political slogan may help to bring on a war.

What was it St. Augustine said? she asked herself. "The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance." Yes—I am meeting more resistance lately.

The well-known theologian Augustine adopted the point of view that Scripture, with the exception of prophecy, should be interpreted naturally and literally.

He loathes what he has left behind him, and it is natural to guess that, in his first years of priesthood, his religious nature slept; that he became a priest and notary merely that he "might eat a morsel of bread"; and that real "conviction" never was his till his studies of Protestant controversialists, and also of St. Augustine and the Bible, and the teaching of Wishart, raised him from a mundane life. 

St. Augustine once defined peace as "tranquility in order "The plan of life is what finally imposed a spiritual order on my ordinary days. And that order was the necessary precondition of peace.

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.

Augustine is so wholly with me, that if I wished to write a confession of my faith, I could do so with all fullness and satisfaction to myself out of his writings.

in Augustine with this expression, - "God crowns not our merits but his own gifts; and the name of reward is given not to what is due to our merits, but to the recompense of grace previously bestowed?

And, as Augustine expresses it (in Psalm cxliv.), since we are unable to comprehend Him, and are, as it were, overpowered by his greatness, our proper course is to contemplate his works, and