Quotes from St. Augustine

Our God have mercy upon us, that we may use the law lawfully, the end of the commandment, pure charity.

No longer, then, follow after false and deceitful gods; abjure them rather, and despise them, bursting forth into true liberty. Gods they are not, but malignant spirits, to whom your eternal happiness will be a sore punishment.

Press on where truth begins to dawn.

But unscrupulous ambition has nothing to work upon, save in a nation corrupted by avarice and luxury.

Then, again, there are three things which every artificer must possess if he is to effect anything,—nature, education, practice. Nature is to be judged by capacity, education by knowledge, practice by its fruit.

Why then be perverted and follow thy flesh? Be it converted and follow thee.

The meek are those who yield to acts of wickedness, and do not resist evil, but overcome evil with good.

Good God! what takes place in man, that he should more rejoice at the salvation of a soul despaired of, and freed from greater peril, than if there had always been hope of him, or the danger had been less?

For if eternity and time are rightly distinguished by this, that time does not exist without some movement and transition, while in eternity there is no change, who does not see that there could have been no time had not some creature been made, which by some motion could give birth to change.

Therefore, to obtain blessedness, we need not quit every kind of body, but only the corruptible, cumbersome, painful, dying,—not such bodies as the goodness of God contrived for the first man, but such only as man's sin entailed.

Wherefore, whoever he be who deems himself happy because of license to revile, he would be far happier if that were not allowed him at all; for he might all the while, laying aside empty boast, be contradicting those to whose views he is opposed by way of free consultation with them, and be listening, as it becomes him, honorably, gravely, candidly, to all that can be adduced by those whom he consults by friendly disputation.

For even the vice which by the force of habit and long continuance has become a second nature, had its origin in the will.