Saint Augustine was a great thinker and philosopher who had a lot of wise things to say. His quotes are still relevant today and can be applied to many different situations. Here are some of our favorite Saint Augustine quotes.
Saint Augustine was born in 354 AD in Thagaste, Numidia, which is now Souk Ahras, Algeria. He was the son of Patricius, a pagan, and Monica, a Christian. Augustine had a brother, Navigius, and a sister, Justina. As a young man, Augustine was a Manichean, but after reading the Skeptics he became a skeptic himself. Augustine then converted to Christianity, was baptized in 387 AD, and became a priest in 391 AD. As a priest, Augustine was a prolific writer, and his most famous work is The City of God. Augustine died in 430 AD.
Saint Augustine was a prolific writer and his works are still studied and read today. He wrote about many different subjects, but his most famous work is the City of God, which was written in response to the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 AD. In this work, Saint Augustine offers a theological justification for the existence of the Christian city of Rome. He also defends the faith against the charge that it was responsible for the fall of Rome.
Saint Augustine‘s Confessions is an autobiographical account of the author’s journey from sin to redemption. In the fourth and final chapter, Augustine reflects on the meaning of his redemption and how it can be shared with others. He concludes by urging his readers to seek God’s grace and to accept it with gratitude.
If you’re looking for some wise and insightful words, you’ll find them in Saint Augustine quotes.
103 Saint Augustine Quotes
- “The measure of love is to love without measure.”
2. “The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.”
3. “I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love…I sought what I might love, in love with loving.”
4. “Love is the beauty of the soul”
5. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
6. “There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.”
7. “Patience is the companion of wisdom.”
8. “To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement.”
9. “The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.”
10. “The world is a book, and those who don’t travel only read one page.”
11. “In order to discover the character of people we have only to observe what they love.”
12. “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”
13. “God provides the wind, Man must raise the sail. ”
14. “Our hearts have been made for you, O God, and they shall never rest until they rest in you.”
15. “Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.”
Famous Saint Augustine Quotes
16. “God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them.”
17. “God has promised forgiveness to your repentance, but He has not promised tomorrow to your procrastination.”
18. “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”
19. “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.”
20. “Faith is to believe what you do not yet see; the reward for this faith is to see what you believe.”
21. “Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.”
22. “Love begins with a smile, grows with a kiss, and ends with a teardrop.”
23. “Christ is not valued at all, unless he is valued above all.”
24. “Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.”
25. “Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.”
26. “The sufficiency of my merit is to know that my merit is not sufficient.”
27. “The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.”
Saint Augustine Quotes on Life
28. “Love and say it with your life.”
29. “Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.”
30. “In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?”
31. “Where your pleasure is, there is your treasure: where your treasure, there your heart; where your heart, there your happiness”
32. “He loves Thee too little, who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake.”
33. “There is, accordingly, a good which is alone simple, and therefore alone unchangeable, and this is God. By this Good have all others been created.”
34. “The Holy Scriptures are our letters from home.”
35. “Oh, God, to know you is life. To serve You is freedom. To praise you is the soul’s joy and delight. Guard me with the power of Your grace here and in all places. Now and at all times, forever. Amen.”
36. “Anger is a weed; hate is the tree.”
Mind-Provoking Saint Augustine Quotes
37. “The Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them.”
38. “There can only be two basic loves… the love of God unto the forgetfulness of self, or the love of self unto the forgetfulness and denial of God.”
39. “The soul is “torn apart in a painful condition as long as it prefers the eternal because of its Truth but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity.”
40. “You never go away from us, yet we have difficulty in returning to You. Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back. Kindle and seize us. Be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love. Let us run.”
41. “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Late have I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you.”
42. “People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.”
43. “Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.”
44. “Sin is looking for the right thing in the wrong place.”
45. “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.”
Positive Saint Augustine Quotes
46. “Love the sinner and hate the sin.”
47. “After all, if no one is happy who does not have what he wants and if the skeptics are always seeking the truth, but do not find it, they cannot be happy. Furthermore, the skeptics claim that their wise man is happy, and yet he cannot be happy since he does not have what he wants.”
48. “For what am I to myself without You, but a guide to my own downfall?”
49. “I held my heart back from positively accepting anything, since I was afraid of another fall, and in this condition of suspense I was being all the more killed.”
50. “In a word, human kingdoms are established by divine providence. And if any one attributes their existence to fate, because he calls the will or the power of God itself by the name of fate, let him keep his opinion, but correct his language.”
51. “We made bad use of immortality, and so ended up dying; Christ made good use of mortality, so that we might end up living.”
52. “The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave.”
53. “God grants us not always what we ask so as to bestow something preferable.”
54. “Charity is the root of all good works.”
Saint Augustine Quotes on Love, Faith and Death
56. “If you understood him, it would not be God.”
57. “There is no sin unless through a man’s own will, and hence the reward when we do right things also of our own will.”
58. “Venerate the martyrs, praise, love, proclaim, honor them. But worship the God of the martyrs.”
59. “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.”
60. “What grace is meant to do is to help good people, not to escape their sufferings, but to bear them with a stout heart, with a fortitude that finds its strength in faith.”
61. “Humility must accompany all our actions, must be with us everywhere; for as soon as we glory in our good works they are of no further value to our advancement in virtue. ”
62. “Because a thing is eloquently expressed it should not be taken to be as necessarily true; nor because it is uttered with stammering lips should it be supposed false.”
63. “Love is ever new because it never groweth old.”
64. “Pray as though everything depends on God. And work as if everything depends on you.”
65. “And the good delight to hear of the past evils of such as are now freed from them, not because they are evils, but because they have been and are not.”
66. “Yet we must say something when those who say the most are saying nothing.”
67. “The life also which here we live hath its own enchantment, through a certain proportion of its own, and a correspondence with all things beautiful here below.”
68. “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.”
69. “Do not believe yourself healthy. Immortality is health; this life is a long sickness.”
70. “The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.”
71. “We speak, but it is God who teaches.”
72. “They, then, who are destined to die, need not be careful to inquire what death they are to die, but into what place death will usher them.”
73. “You are my Lord, because You have no need of my goodness.”
74. “But however much that virtue may be praised and cried up, which without true piety is the slave of human glory, it is not at all to be compared even to the feeble beginnings of the virtue of the saints, whose hope is placed in the grace and mercy of the true God.”
75. “Every visible thing in this world is put in the charge of an Angel.”
76. “Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.”
77. “For we cannot listen to those who maintain that the invisible God works no visible miracles; for even they believe that He made the world, which surely they will not deny to be visible. Whatever marvel happens in this world, it is certainly less marvelous than this whole world itself.”
77. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
78. “For a prohibition always increases an illicit desire so long as the love of and joy in holiness is too weak to conquer the inclination to sin…”
79. “You wish to be great, begin from the least. You are thinking to construct some mighty fabric in height; first think of the foundation of humility. And how great soever a mass of building one may wish and design to place above it, the greater the building is to be, the deeper does he dig his foundation.”
80. “Every day my conscience makes confession relying on the hope of Your mercy as more to be trusted than its own innocence.”
81. “It is as if he should feel that there is an enemy who could be more destructive to himself than that hatred which excites him against his fellow man; or that he could destroy him whom he hates more completely than he destroys his own soul by this same hatred.”
82. “What do I love when I love my God?”
83. “Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he lives so as to make happiness impossible.”
84. “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.”
85. “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.”
86. “Do not abandon what You have begun in me, but go on to perfect all that remains unfinished.”
87. “For if the soul, once delivered, as it never was before, is never to return to misery, then there happens in its experience something which never happened before; and this, indeed, something of the greatest consequence, to wit, the secure entrance into eternal felicity.”
88. “It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.”
89. “Those impostors then, whom they style Mathematicians, I consulted without scruple; because they seemed to use no sacrifice, nor to pray to any spirit for their divinations.”
90. “Your best servant is the person who does not attend so much to hearing what he himself wants as to willing what he has heard from you.”
91. “Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.”
92. “His knowledge is not like ours, which has three tenses: present, past, and future. God’s knowledge has no change or variation.”
93. “Man, born in a family, is compelled to maintain society. Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?”
94. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.”
95. “A person can do other things against his will, but belief is possible only in one who is willing. ”
96. “Human friendship also is endeared with a sweet tie, by reason of the unity formed of many souls.”
97. “He that becomes protector of sin shall surely become its prisoner.”
98. “If there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, then truth itself is God.”
99. “I will pass then beyond this power of my nature also, rising by degrees unto Him Who made me.”
100. “The good man is free, even if he is a slave. The evil man is a slave, even if he is a king.”
101. “Don’t hold yourselves cheap, seeing that the creator of all things and of you estimates your value so high, so dear, that he pours out for you every day the most precious blood of his only-begotten Son.”
102. “God, whose knowledge is simply manifold, and uniform in its variety, comprehends all incomprehensibles with so incomprehensible a comprehension, that though He willed always to make His later works novel and unlike what went before them, He could not produce them without order and foresight, nor conceive them suddenly, but by His eternal foreknowledge.”
103. “Be not foolish, O my soul, nor become deaf in the ear of thine heart with the tumult of thy folly. Hearken thou too. The Word itself calleth thee to return: and there is the place of rest imperturbable, where love is not forsaken, if itself forsaketh not.”