Top 500 Saint Augustine Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio. What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobodyasksme; but if Iamasked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.”

— Saint Augustine

402. “The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.”

— Saint Augustine

403. “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?”

— Saint Augustine

404. “Poetry is the Devil’s wine.”

— Saint Augustine

405. “God is not a deceiver, that He should offer to support us, and then, when we lean upon Him, should slip away from us.”

— Saint Augustine

406. “Unhappy is the soul enslaved by the love of anything that is mortal.”

— Saint Augustine

407. “You don’t love in your enemies what they are, but what you would have them become by your prayers.”

— Saint Augustine

408. “All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they torment freshly-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless new-born infants.”

— Saint Augustine

409. “O Sacrament of Love! O sign of Unity! O bond of Charity! He who would have Life finds here indeed a Life to live in and a Life to live by.”

— Saint Augustine

410. “Just think of the illimitable abundance and the marvelous loveliness of light, or of the beauty of the sun and moon and stars.”

— Saint Augustine

411. “By means of corporal and temporal things we may comprehend the eternal and the spiritual.”

— Saint Augustine

412. “Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.”

— Saint Augustine

413. “It is better that the truth be known than that scandal be covered up.”

— Saint Augustine

414. “His knowledge is not like ours, which has three tenses; present, past, and future. God’s knowledge has no change or variation.”

— Saint Augustine

415. “Although God is all powerful, He is unable to give more; though supremely wise, He knows not how to give more; though vastly rich, He has not more to give.”

— Saint Augustine

416. “Feast of Willibrord of York, Archbishop of Utrecht, Apostle of Frisia, 739 Other sins find their vent in the accomplishment of evil deeds, whereas pride lies in wait for good deeds, to destroy them.”

— Saint Augustine

417. “If there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, then truth itself is God.”

— Saint Augustine

418. “The customs of God’s people and the institutions of our ancestors are to be considered as laws. And those who throw contempt on the customs of the Church ought to be punished as those who disobey the law of God.”

— Saint Augustine

419. “Often the contempt of vainglory becomes a source of even more vainglory, for it is not being scorned when the contempt is something one is proud of.”

— Saint Augustine

420. “When I seek you, my God, I seek a blessed life. I shall seek you, so that my soul may live.”

— Saint Augustine

421. “What do you possess if you possess not God?”

— Saint Augustine

422. “Do not believe yourself healthy. Immortality is health; this life is a long sickness.”

— Saint Augustine

423. “It is not that we keep His commandments first and that then He loves but that He loves us and then we keep His commandments. This is that grace which is revealed to the humble but hidden from the proud.”

— Saint Augustine

424. “Even the straws under my knees shout to distract me from prayer.”

— Saint Augustine

425. “My mother spoke of Christ to my father, by her feminine and childlike virtues, and, after having borne his violence without a murmur or complaint, gained him at the close of his life to Christ.”

— Saint Augustine

426. “For, were it not good that evil things should also exist, the omnipotent God would almost certainly not allow evil to be, since beyond doubt it is just as easy for Him not to allow what He does not will, as for Him to do what He will.”

— Saint Augustine

427. “We make ourselves a ladder out of our vices if we trample the vices themselves underfoot.”

— Saint Augustine

428. “Wicked sons do not have the Holy Ghost in the same way as do beloved sons, and yet they do have Baptism. So, too, heretics do not have the Church as Catholics have, even though they have Baptism.”

— Saint Augustine

429. “How high a price we pay for the burden of habit! I am fitted for life here where I do not want to be, I want to live there but am unfit for it, and on both counts I am miserable.”

— Saint Augustine

430. “By faithfulness we are collected and wound up into unity within ourselves, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity.”

— Saint Augustine

431. “This world’s a bubble.”

— Saint Augustine

432. “My love for you, Lord, is not an uncertain feeling, but a matter of concious certainty. With your word you pierced my heart, and I loved you. But heaven and earth and everything in them on all sides tell me to love you.”

— Saint Augustine

433. “God will cleanse your sins if you yourself are dissatisfied with yourself and will keep on changing until you are perfect.”

— Saint Augustine

434. “It is said that there is no salvation outside the Church. Who denies this? And therefore whatever things of the Church are had outside the Church do not avail unto salvation.”

— Saint Augustine

435. “If faith fails, prayer perishes.”

— Saint Augustine

436. “I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn’t find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance – You, O God – towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matters.”

— Saint Augustine

437. “God bids you not to commit lechery, that is, not to have sex with any woman except your wife. You ask of her that she should not have sex with anyone except you – yet you are not willing to observe the same restraint in return.”

— Saint Augustine

438. “I will plant my feet on that step where my parents put me as a child, until self-evident truth comes to light.”

— Saint Augustine

439. “I want my friend to miss me as long as I miss him.”

— Saint Augustine

440. “If two friends ask you to judge a dispute, don’t accept, because you will...”

— Saint Augustine

441. “The soul, which is spirit, can not dwell in dust; it is carried along to dwell in the blood.”

— Saint Augustine

442. “One generation and another generation; the generation by which we are made the faithful, and are born again by baptism; the generation by which we shall rise again from the dead, and shall live with the Angels for ever.”

— Saint Augustine

443. “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

444. “The same divine authority that forbids the killing of a human being establishes certain exceptions, as when God authorizes killing by a general law or when He gives an explicit commission to an individual for a limited time.”

— Saint Augustine

445. “A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.”

— Saint Augustine

446. “What is reprehensible is that while leading good lives themselves and abhorring those of wicked men, some, fearing to offend, shut their eyes to evil deeds instead of condemning them and pointing out their malice.”

— Saint Augustine

447. “For a sentence is not complete unless each word, once its syllables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next.”

— Saint Augustine

448. “I was unhappy and so is every soul unhappy which is tied to its love for mortal things; when it loses them, it is torn in pieces, and it is then that it comes to realize the unhappiness which was there even before it lost them.”

— Saint Augustine

449. “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?”

— Saint Augustine

450. “Ninety percent of the time things turn out worse than you thought they would. The other ten percent of the time you had no right to expect that much.”

— Saint Augustine