Quotes About Augustine

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.

Augustine recast how people should view history, that history was not the story of the rise and fall of empires because those are human things. Those are the city of man. Rather, true history should be the history of salvation, of man moving toward God. It's a focus that takes the light off of this world and shines it much more brightly on the next world.

So for Calvin, even as for Augustine, God does not really will that all be saved,

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.

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.

Saint 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.

Augustine [of Hippo] knew the power and the danger of idolatry and celebrity. And he knew the danger of both was first to permit the idolater to offload the duty of thinking onto their idol. And second to seduce the celebrity, in turn, into thinking his fans have nothing insightful to say. That treatment of a fellow human, a fellow christian, would be not the achievement of theology but the avoidance of it. And he went out of his way in his life and in his words to forestall such approaches.

Augustine's concept of time was sacramental: time participates in the eternity of God's life, and it is this participation that is able to gather past, present, and future together into one.11

He maintains that when, by faith, we share in the one eucharistic body, the Spirit makes us one ecclesial body. As Augustine would put it, we become what we have received. Or, as de Lubac famously phrases it, the Eucharist makes the church.

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

Now, as St. Augustine saw long ago, the opposite of love is pride. Love eliminates pride because its will for the good of the other nullifies our arrogant presumption that we should get our way. We are concerned for the good of others and assured that our good is taken care of without self-will. Thus pride and fear and their dreadful offspring no longer rule our life as love becomes completed in us.

talking about clear minds writing in clear language—the predictions of Saint Augustine, Sir Francis Bacon, Newton, Einstein, the list goes on and on, all anticipating a transformative moment of enlightenment. Even

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.

The concept of the 'secular', first planted by Augustine, and tended by Columbanus, had attained a spectacular bloom. Gregory and his fellow reformers did not invent the distinction between religio and the saeculum, between the sacred and the profane; but they did render it something fundamental to the future of the West, 'for the first time and permanently'.16 A decisive moment.

ago, Augustine argued that if God knows something's

Calvin offers neither biblical nor rational proof for his (Augustine's) theory. In typical fashion, he mocks what he calls "the slanders of the ungodly" as though anyone who disagrees with him and Augustine is necessarily ungodly. Such would be his attitude toward many today who, professing a more moderate position, call themselves four-point or three-point Calvinists.

The conclusion, therefore, is that of Augustine, who said that the heart of man was created for God and that it cannot find rest until it rests in his Father's heart. Hence all men are really seeking after God, as Augustine also declared, but they do not all seek Him in the right way, nor at the right place.

173Augustine speaks of a Christianity which has existed since the beginning of the human race,

There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism

God loves each one of us as if there was only one of us to love, said Augustine.

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?

THE VERY ORDER, DISPOSITION, BEAUTY, CHANGE AND MOTION OF THE WORLD AND OF ALL VISIBLE THINGS SILENTLY PROCLAIM THAT IT COULD ONLY HAVE BEEN MADE BY GOD. —AUGUSTINE

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

Strangely, Augustine held to a literal second coming, a literal heaven and a literal hell, but not to a literal millennium. This arbitrary distinction has never been explained.