Augustine of Hippo Quotes

252 Sourced Quotes

Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe that thou mayest understand.

Augustine of Hippo
Give, O Lord, what Thou commandest, and then command what Thou wilt.

Augustine of Hippo
It is not the being seen of men that is wrong, but doing these things for the purpose of being seen of men. The problem with the hypocrite is his motivation.

Augustine of Hippo
Why is it that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would by no means suffer?

Augustine of Hippo
What is held by the whole Church, and that not as instituted by Councils, but as a matter of invariable custom, is rightly held to have been handed down by authority.

Augustine of Hippo
Christ's whole body groans in pain. Until the end of the world, when pain will pass away, this man groans and cries to God. And each one of us has part in the cry of that whole body. Thou didst cry out in thy day, and thy days have passed away; another took thy place and cried out in his day. Thou here, he there, and another there. The body of Christ ceases not to cry out all the day, one member replacing the other whose voice is hushed. Thus there is but one man who reaches unto the end of time, and those that cry are always His members.

Augustine of Hippo
What tigress is there that does not purr over her young ones, and fawn upon them in tenderness?

Augustine of Hippo
We made bad use of immortality, and so ended up dying; Christ made good use of mortality, so that we might end up living.

Augustine of Hippo
If bodies please thee, praise God on occasion of them, and turn back thy love upon their Maker; lest in these things which please thee, thou displease. If souls please thee, be they loved in God: for they too are mutable, but in Him they are firmly established.

Augustine of Hippo
Christ is not valued at all unless He be valued above all.

Augustine of Hippo
He who created you without you will not justify you without you.

Augustine of Hippo
When large numbers of people share their joy in common, the happiness of each is greater because each adds fuel to the other's flame.

Augustine of Hippo
For if it is not lawful to take the law into our own hands and slay even a guilty person, whose death no public sentence has warranted. Then certainly he who kills himself is a homicide, and so much the guiltier of his own death as he was more innocent of that offence for which he doomed himself to die.

Augustine of Hippo
It is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds.

Augustine of Hippo
The members of Christ, many though they be, are bound to one another by the ties of charity and peace under the one Head, who is our Saviour Himself, and form one man. Often their voice is heard in the Psalms as the voice of one man; the cry of one is as the cry of all, for all are one in One.

Augustine of Hippo
It is salutary for us to learn to hold cheap such things, be they good or evil, as attach indifferently to good men and bad, and to covet those good things which belong only to good men, and flee those evils which belong only to evil men.

Augustine of Hippo
Time is like a river made up of events which happen, and its current is strong; no sooner does anything appear than it is swept away.

Augustine of Hippo
Furthermore, what profit was it to me that I, rascally slave of selfish ambitions that I was, read and understood by myself as many books as I could get concerning the so-called liberal arts?...I had turned my back to the light and my face to the things it illuminated, and so no light played upon my own face, or on the eyes that perceived them.

Augustine of Hippo
Just as it is agreed that we all wish to be happy, so it is that we all wish to be wise, since no one without wisdom is happy.

Augustine of Hippo
When regard for truth has been broken down or even slightly weakened, all things will remain doubtful.

Augustine of Hippo
Fortitude is the disposition of soul which enables us to despise all inconveniences and the loss of things not in our power.

Augustine of Hippo
I acknowledge Thee, Lord of heaven and earth, and praise Thee for my first rudiments of being, and my infancy, whereof I remember nothing; for Thou hast appointed that man should from others guess much as to himself; and believe much on the strength of weak females.

Augustine of Hippo
If I am given a formula, and I am ignorant of its meaning, it cannot teach me anything, but if I already know it what does the formula teach me?

Augustine of Hippo
Sin is to a nature what blindness is to an eye. The blindness of an evil or defect which is a witness to the fact that the eye was created to see the light and, hence, the very lack of sight is the proof that the eye was meant... to be the one particularly capable of seeing the light. Were it not for this capacity, there would be no reason to think of blindness as a misforture.

Augustine of Hippo
At the beginning of the human race the woman was made of a rib taken from the side of the man while he slept; for it seemed fit that even then Christ and His Church should be foreshadowed in this event. For that sleep of the man was the death of Christ, whose side, as He hung lifeless upon the Cross, was pierced with a spear, and there flowed from it blood and water, and these we know to be the sacraments by which the Church is built up.

Augustine of Hippo
If a shameless woman expects to be defiled and then dies of her fierce love because you do not consent, will chastity also be homicide?

Augustine of Hippo
His knowledge is not like ours, which has three tenses; present, past, and future. God's knowledge has no change or variation.

Augustine of Hippo
Thou movest us to delight in praising Thee; for Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.

Augustine of Hippo
What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know: but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not.

Augustine of Hippo
It is not earthly riches which make us or our sons happy; for they must either be lost by us in our lifetime, or be possessed when we are dead, by whom we know not, or perhaps by whom we would not.

Augustine of Hippo