Top 500 Saint Augustine Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “What is grace? I know until you ask me; when you ask me, I do not know.”

— Saint Augustine

302. “Better that I find you, God, and leave the questions unanswered, than to find the answers without finding you.”

— Saint Augustine

303. “What are kingdoms without justice? They’re just gangs of bandits.”

— Saint Augustine

304. “Every visible thing in this world is put in the charge of an angel.”

— Saint Augustine

305. “If by fate anyone means the will or power of God, let him keep his meaning but mend his language; for fate commonly means a necessary process which will have its way apart from the will of God and men.”

— Saint Augustine

306. “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.”

— Saint Augustine

307. “All those who belong to Jesus Christ are fastened with Him to the cross.”

— Saint Augustine

308. “Chastity, or cleanness of heart, holds a glorious and distinguished place among the virtues, because she, alone, enables man to see God; hence Truth itself said, ‘Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.’”

— Saint Augustine

309. “Give her two red roses, each with a note. The first note says For the woman I love and the second, For my best friend.”

— Saint Augustine

310. “We are certainly in a common class with the beasts; every action of animal life is concerned with seeking bodily pleasure and avoiding pain.”

— Saint Augustine

311. “It is not often that we use language correctly; usually we use it incorrectly, though we understand each others meaning.”

— Saint Augustine

312. “Put no faith in salvation through the political order.”

— Saint Augustine

313. “To touch God a little with our mind is a great blessing, to grasp him is impossible.”

— Saint Augustine

314. “No eulogy is due to him who simply does his duty and nothing more.”

— Saint Augustine

315. “Before God can deliver us we must undeceive ourselves.”

— Saint Augustine

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

— Saint Augustine

317. “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.”

— Saint Augustine

318. “Though defensive violence will always be ‘a sad necessity’ in the eyes of men of principle, it would be still more unfortunate if wrongdoers should dominate just men.”

— Saint Augustine

319. “Beware of bad Catholics.”

— Saint Augustine

320. “The world being unworthy to receive the Son of God directly from the hands of the Father, he gave his Son to Mary for the world to receive him from her.”

— Saint Augustine

321. “There is nothing more serious than the sacrilege of schism because there is no just cause for severing the unity of the Church.”

— Saint Augustine

322. “Conscience and reputation are two things. Conscience is due to yourself, reputation to your neighbour.”

— Saint Augustine

323. “Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist. You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.”

— Saint Augustine

324. “Hope has two lovely daughters, anger and courage.”

— Saint Augustine

325. “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

326. “The Kingdom of Heaven, O man, requires no other price than yourself. The value of it is yourself. Give yourself for it and you shall have it.”

— Saint Augustine

327. “A man may lose the good things of this life against his will; but if he loses the eternal blessings, he does so with his own consent.”

— Saint Augustine

328. “To wisdom belongs the intellectual apprehension of eternal things; to knowledge, the rational knowledge of temporal things.”

— Saint Augustine

329. “If two friends ask you to judge a dispute, don’t accept, because you will lose one friend; on the other hand, if two strangers come with the same request, accept because you will gain one friend.”

— Saint Augustine

330. “Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.”

— Saint Augustine

331. “Love has reasons that reason knows not.”

— Saint Augustine

332. “You called and shouted and burst my deafness. You flashed, shone, and scattered my blindness. You breathed odors, and I drew in breath and panted for You. I tasted, and I hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burned for Your peace.”

— Saint Augustine

333. “Free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under Your Law.”

— Saint Augustine

334. “The weakness of little children’s limbs is innocent, not their souls .”

— Saint Augustine

335. “God will not suffer man to have a knowledge of things to come for if he had prescience of his prosperity, he would be careless and if understanding of his adversity, he would be despairing and senseless.”

— Saint Augustine

336. “There is no remedy so powerful against the heat of concupiscence as the remembrance of our Savior’s Passion. In all my difficulties I never found anything so efficacious as the wounds of Christ: In them I sleep secure; from them I derive new life.”

— Saint Augustine

337. “Every day my conscience makes confession relying on the hope of Your mercy as more to be trusted than its own innocence.”

— Saint Augustine

338. “God is more truly imagined than expressed, and He exists more truly than He is imagined.”

— Saint Augustine

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

— Saint Augustine

340. “For if a thing is not diminished by being shared with others, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned and not shared.”

— Saint Augustine

341. “The human race is inquisitive about other people’s lives, but negligent to correct their own.”

— Saint Augustine

342. “Eternity is the now that does not pass away.”

— Saint Augustine

343. “No man has a right to lead such a life of contemplation as to forget in his own ease the service due to his neighbor.”

— Saint Augustine

344. “I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.”

— Saint Augustine

345. “What is time? If I am not asked, I know; if I am asked, I don’t.”

— Saint Augustine

346. “He cannot have God for his Father who will not have the Church for his mother.”

— Saint Augustine

347. “The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.”

— Saint Augustine

348. “I fell away from you, my God, and I went astray, too far astray from you, the support of my youth, and I became to myself a land of want.”

— Saint Augustine

349. “I did not find you outside, O Lord, because I made the mistake of seeking outside you who were within.”

— Saint Augustine

350. “In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you, they would have not been at all.”

— Saint Augustine