Augustine Of Hippo, Confessions Quotes
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.
The Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them.
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.
Such is the strength of the burden of habit. Here I have the power to be but do not wish it. There I wish to be but lacks the power. On both grounds, I'm in misery.
Every day my conscience makes confession relying on the hope of Your mercy as more to be trusted than its own innocence.
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.
For what am I to myself without You, but a guide to my own downfall?
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.
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.
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.
You never depart from us, but yet, only with difficulties do we return to You.
You are not the mind itself. For You are the Lord God of the mind. All these things are liable to change, but You remain immutable above all things.
Oh! that I might repose on Thee! Oh! that Thou wouldest enter into my heart, inebriate it, that I may forget my ills, and embrace Thee, my sole good?
A sense of Deity is inscribed on every heart. Nay, even idolatry is ample evidence of this fact.
That vague and wandering opinion of Deity is declared by an apostle to be ignorance of God:
Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.