Augustine of Hippo - The City of God (426 AD)

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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 not with respect to our convenience or discomfort, but with respect to their own nature that the creatures are glorifying to their Artificer.

Augustine of Hippo
We enjoy some gratification when our good friends die; for though their death leaves us in sorrow, we have the consolatory assurance that they are beyond the ills by which in this life even the best of people are broken down or corrupted.

Augustine of Hippo
Just think of the illimitable abundance and the marvelous loveliness of light, or of the beauty of the sun and moon and stars.

Augustine of Hippo
Where Scripture speaks of the world's creation, it is not plainly said whether or when the angels were created; but if mention is made, it is implicit under the name of "heaven," when it is said, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Augustine of Hippo
For when God said, "Let there be light, and there was light," if we are justified in understanding in this light the creation of the angels, then certainly they were created partakers of the eternal light which is the unchangeable Wisdom of God, by which all things were made, and whom we call the only-begotten Son of God.

Augustine of Hippo
Samson crushed himself and his enemies to death beneath the ruins of a building. He can only be excused on the grounds that the Spirit of the Lord, who wrought miracles through him, had bidden him to do so. But, apart from such men excepted by the command of a just law in general or of God, the very Source of justice, in a special case, any one who kills a human being, himself or another, is guilty of murder.

Augustine of Hippo
The wicked have told me of things that delight them, but not such things as your law has to tell.

Augustine of Hippo
Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms.

Augustine of Hippo
Why is it that we remember with difficulty and without difficulty forget? Learn with difficulty and without difficulty remain ignorant?

Augustine of Hippo
For what is the self-complacent man but a slave to his own self-praise.

Augustine of Hippo
Then assuredly the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.

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
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
For a sentence is not complete unless each word, once its syllables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next...They are set up on the course of their existence, and the faster they climb towards its zenith, the more they hasten towards the point where they exist no more.

Augustine of Hippo
The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God.

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

Augustine of Hippo
So you see how endlessly futile and fruitless it would be if we wanted to refute their objections every time they obstinately resolved not to think through what they say but merely to speak, just so long as they contradict our arguments in any way they can.

Augustine of Hippo
When the king asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied:
The same as you do when you infest the whole world;
but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber,
and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.

Augustine of Hippo
True happiness is to rejoice in the truth, for to rejoice in the truth is to rejoice in You, O God, who are the truth... Those who think that there is another kind of happiness look for joy elsewhere, but theirs is not true joy.

Augustine of Hippo
The works of Creation are described as being completed in six days, the same formula for a day being repeated six times. The reason for this is that six is the number of perfection.

Augustine of Hippo
Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.

Augustine of Hippo
The dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater license in wickedness; while those who are put under them in service are not hurt except by their own iniquity. For to the just all the evils imposed on them by unjust rulers are not the punishment of crime, but the test of virtue. Therefore the good man, although he is a slave, is free; but the bad man, even if he reigns, is a slave, and that not of one man, but, what is far more grievous, of as many masters as he has vices; of which vices when the divine Scripture treats, it says, For of whom any man is overcome, to the same he is also the bond-slave.

Augustine of Hippo
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.

Augustine of Hippo
What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.

Augustine of Hippo
Thus, in this universal catastrophe, the sufferings of Christians have tended to their moral improvement, because they viewed them with eyes of faith.

Augustine of Hippo
Though in the order of nature angels rank above men, yet, by scale of justice, good men are of greater value than bad angels.

Augustine of Hippo
The people who remained victorious were less like conquerors than conquered.

Augustine of Hippo