Top 500 Saint Augustine Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Be always displeased with what you are if you wish to be what you are not. Always add, always walk, always proceed. Neither stand still nor go back nor deviate.”

— Saint Augustine

352. “He who falls, falls by his own will, and he who stands, stands by God’s will.”

— Saint Augustine

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

— Saint Augustine

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

— Saint Augustine

355. “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

356. “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

357. “Cursed is everyone who places his hope in changing the nature of man.”

— Saint Augustine

358. “What you are must always displease you, if you would attain to that which you are not.”

— Saint Augustine

359. “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

360. “Passion is the evil in adultery. If a man has no opportunity of living with another man’s wife, but if it is obvious for some reason that he would like to do so, and would do so if he could, he is no less guilty than if he was caught in the act.”

— Saint Augustine

361. “It is easy to want things from the Lord and yet not want the Lord Himself, as though the gift could ever be preferable to the Giver.”

— Saint Augustine

362. “The true religion has always been one from the beginning, and will always be the same.”

— Saint Augustine

363. “The spiritual virtue of a sacrament is like light; although it passes among the impure, it is not polluted.”

— Saint Augustine

364. “Singing is a lover’s thing.”

— Saint Augustine

365. “It is not the punishment but the cause that makes the martyr.”

— Saint Augustine

366. “For what is faith unless it is to believe what you do not see?”

— Saint Augustine

367. “In the Mass the blood of Christ flows anew for sinners.”

— Saint Augustine

368. “Virginity is not honored simply because it is virginity, but because it is consecrated of God.”

— Saint Augustine

369. “It’s not in the book or in the writer that readers discern the truth of what they read; they see it in themselves, if the light of truth has penetrated their minds.”

— Saint Augustine

370. “Why is it that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would by no means suffer?”

— Saint Augustine

371. “The most venerable, clearly understood, enlightened, and reliable constant in the world is not only that we want to be happy, but that we want only to be so. Our very nature requires it of us.”

— Saint Augustine

372. “We should never use the truth to wound.”

— Saint Augustine

373. “You are my Lord, because You have no need of my goodness.”

— Saint Augustine

374. “Nothing so casts down the manly mind from it’s height as the fondling of women and those bodily contacts which belong to the married state.”

— Saint Augustine

375. “No one indeed believes anything unless he has first thought that it it to be believed.”

— Saint Augustine

376. “There is something in humility which strangely exalts the heart.”

— Saint Augustine

377. “Jesus took His flesh from the flesh of Mary.”

— Saint Augustine

378. “Do you who are a Christian desire to be revenged and vindicated, and the death of Jesus Christ has not yet been revenged, nor His innocence vindicated?”

— Saint Augustine

379. “Every good and true Christian should understand that wherever he may find the truth it is his Lord’s.”

— Saint Augustine

380. “Unjust laws aren’t laws at all.”

— Saint Augustine

381. “Grace alone brings about every good work in us.”

— Saint Augustine

382. “We judge all things according to the divine truth.”

— Saint Augustine

383. “The people who remained victorious were less like conquerors than conquered.”

— Saint Augustine

384. “The measure of charity may be taken from the want of desires. As desires diminish in the soul, charity increases in it; and when it no longer feels any desire, then it possesses perfect charity.”

— Saint Augustine

385. “I was in love with loving.”

— Saint Augustine

386. “There is no possible source of evil except good.”

— Saint Augustine

387. “Custom is second nature.”

— Saint Augustine

388. “Salvation is God’s way of making us real people.”

— Saint Augustine

389. “I asked the whole frame of the world about my God; and he answered, I am not He, but He made me.”

— Saint Augustine

390. “Things are solved by walking around.”

— Saint Augustine

391. “If a parricide is more wicked than anyone who commits homicide-because he kills not merely a man but a near relative-without doubt worse still is he who kills himself, because there is none nearer to a man than himself.”

— Saint Augustine

392. “The world’s verdict is conclusive.”

— Saint Augustine

393. “Choose to love whomsoever thou wilt: all else will follow.”

— Saint Augustine

394. “Why is it that we remember with difficulty and without difficulty forget? Learn with difficulty and without difficulty remain ignorant?”

— Saint Augustine

395. “The entire most beautiful order of things that are very good, when their measures have been accomplished, is to pass away.”

— Saint Augustine

396. “Heaven forbid that we should believe in such a way as not to accept or seek reasons, since we could not even believe if we did not possess rational souls.”

— Saint Augustine

397. “When, therefore, man lives according to man, not according to God, he is like the devil.”

— Saint Augustine

398. “The custom of Mother Church in baptizing infants is certainly not to be scorned, nor is it to be regarded in any way as superfluous, nor is it to be believed that its tradition is anything except apostolic.”

— Saint Augustine

399. “God grants us not always what we ask so as to bestow something preferable.”

— Saint Augustine

400. “Great are those two gifts, wisdom and continence: wisdom, forsooth, whereby we are formed in the knowledge of God; continence whereby we are not conformed to this world.”

— Saint Augustine