Quotes about Augustine

Augustine said it best: You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

Saint Augustine said it best: You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

Augustine's concept of time was sacramental: time participates in the eternity of God's life, and it is this participation that is able to gather past, present, and future together into one.

He maintains that when, by faith, we share in the one eucharistic body, the Spirit makes us one ecclesial body. As Augustine would put it, we become what we have received. Or, as de Lubac famously phrases it, the Eucharist makes the church.

Now, as St. Augustine saw long ago, the opposite of love is pride. Love eliminates pride because its will for the good of the other nullifies our arrogant presumption that we should get our way. We are concerned for the good of others and assured that our good is taken care of without self-will. Thus pride and fear and their dreadful offspring no longer rule our life as love becomes completed in us.

St. Augustine adds that God has taught us to praise Him, in the Psalms, not in order that He may get something out of this praise, but in order that we may be made better by it. Praising God in the words of the Psalms, we can come to know Him better. Knowing Him better we love Him better, loving Him better we find our happiness in Him.

There is no possible source of evil except good.

Love, and He will draw near; love, and He will dwell within you.

The human mind may perceive truth only through thinking, as is clear from Augustine.

Here he employed himself in reading St. Augustine and the school men; but, in turning over the leaves of the library, he accidentally found a copy of the Latin Bible, which he had never seen before. This raised his curiosity to a high degree: he read it over very greedily, and was amazed to find what a small portion of the scriptures was rehearsed to the people.

For all its newness, we can understand the Reformation as a Renaissance phenomenon. It is antiquarian in the sense that it returns ad fontes, to the Scriptures and the older church fathers, particularly Augustine, bypassing much, but not all, of medieval scholasticism. It is humanistic in that it is concerned in a fresh way with the individual's relation to God.

The law was given that grace might be sought; grace was given that the law might be fulfilled" (Augustine).