Saint Augustine – 29 Quotes

29 Quotes by Saint Augustine

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.

– Saint Augustine

Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full, that thou mayest be filled with that whereof thou art empty.

– Saint Augustine

Love is the beauty of the soul.

– Saint Augustine

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

– Saint Augustine

Beauty is indeed a good gift of God but that the good may not think it a great good, God dispenses it even to the wicked.

– Saint Augustine

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.

– Saint Augustine

Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.

– Saint Augustine

Faith is to believe what you do not see the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.

– Saint Augustine

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.

– Saint Augustine

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

– Saint Augustine

God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.

– Saint Augustine

God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering.

– Saint Augustine

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.

– Saint Augustine

Find out how much God has given you and from it take what you need the remainder is needed by others.

– Saint Augustine

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

– Saint Augustine

In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?

– Saint Augustine

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.

– Saint Augustine

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.

– Saint Augustine

Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.

– Saint Augustine

Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.

– Saint Augustine

He that is jealous is not in love.

– Saint Augustine

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.

– Saint Augustine

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

– Saint Augustine

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.

– Saint Augustine

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

– Saint Augustine

Patience is the companion of wisdom.

– Saint Augustine

The purpose of all wars, is peace.

– Saint Augustine

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

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.

– Saint Augustine