Saint Augustine
When people truly open their minds, and contemplate the way in which the universe is ordered and governed, they are amazed-overwhelmed by a sense of the miraculous. When people contemplate with open minds the germination of a single seed, they are equally overwhelmed-yet numerous babies are born every day, and no-one marvels. If only people opened their minds, they would see that the birth of a baby, in which a new life is created, is a greater miracle than restoring life.Collection: Baby
How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.Collection: Past
For why, my brothers and sisters, would you rejoice in silver? Either your silver will perish, or you will, and no one knows which will perish first. For neither can you remain here always, nor can silver remain here always; so also with gold, wardrobes, houses, money, real estate-and in the end, even the light by which we enjoy all these things. So do not be willing then to rejoice in such things as these. Rejoice instead in the light that has no setting; rejoice in the dawn which no yesterday precedes, and no tomorrow follows.Collection: Brother
God's faithful servant has no desire for people to say or to give to him, or what he likes to hear or see, for his first and greatest aim is to hear what is most pleasing to God.Collection: Faithful Servants
The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God. (City of God, Book 19)Collection: Book
Except he be willing, man cannot believe.Collection: Believe
Free curiosity is of more value in learning than harsh discipline.Collection: Discipline
In doing what we ought we deserve no praise, because it is our duty.Collection: Praise
Blessed is he who devotes his life to great and noble ends, and who forms his well-considered plans with deliberate wisdom.Collection: Blessed
God grants us not always what we ask so as to bestow something preferable.Collection: Grants
The mind commands the body, and it obeys forthwith; the mind commands itself, and is resisted. The mind commands the hand to be moved, and such readiness is there that the command is scarce to be distinguished from the obedience. Yet the mind is mind, and the hand is body. The mind commands the mind to will, and yet, though it be itself, it obeyeth not. Whence this monstrous thing? and why is it?Collection: Mind
Let the Lord your God be your hope – seek for nothing else from him, but let him himself be your hope. There are people who hope from him riches or perishable and transitory honours, in short they hope to get from God things which are not God himself.Collection: People
Seek not abroad, for in the inner man dwells the truth.Collection: Truth
Thou hast created us for Thyself, and our heart is not quiet until it rests in Thee.Collection: Philosophical
For it is better to suffer a little want than to have too much.Collection: Suffering
Salvation is God's way of making us real people.Collection: Real
Don't go outside; get back to yourself, in the inner man lies the Truth.Collection: Lying
There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Wise
Carnal lust rules where there is no love of God.Collection: Evil
Beauty grows in you to the extent that love grows, because charity itself is the soul's beauty.Collection: Life
For what is faith unless it is to believe what you do not see?Collection: Inspirational
You say to me 'Show me your God.' I answer you, 'Everything you see in your heart that might sadden God, remove.'Collection: Spiritual
Although among heretics and schismatics there is the same Baptism, nevertheless, the remission of sins is not operative among them because of the very rottenness of discord and wickedness of dissension ... Baptism was in them, but it did not profit them outside the Church ... Outside the Church, Baptism works death because of discord.Collection: Baptism
A brotherly person rejoices on my account when he approves me, but when he disapproves, he is loving me. To such people I will reveal myself. They will take heart from my good traits, and sigh with sadness at my bad ones. My good points are instilled by you and are your gifts. My bad points are my faults and your judgements on them. Let them take heart from the one and regret the other. Let both praise and tears ascend in your sight from brotherly hearts, your censers. ...But you Lord...Make perfect my imperfections.Collection: Regret
I asked the whole frame of the world about my God; and he answered, I am not He, but He made me.Collection: World
O that men would know themselves to be men; and that he that glorieth would glory in the Lord.Collection: Men
Who else is it who calls us back from the death of error, except the life that does not know death, and the wisdom which, needing no light, enlightens minds which are in darkness, that wisdom by which the whole world, even to the leaves of trees drifting in the wind, is governed?Collection: Errors
For in our hope we are saved.Collection: Saved
When I am completely united to You, there will be no more sorrow or trials; entirely full of You, my life will be complete.Collection: Faith
You are my Lord, because You have no need of my goodness.Collection: Needs
Really great things, when discussed by little men, can usually make such men grow big.Collection: Men
Temperance is love surrendering itself wholly to Him who is its object; courage is love bearing all things gladly for the sake of Him who is its object; justice is love serving only Him who is its object, and therefore rightly ruling; prudence is love making wise distinction between what hinders and what helps itself.Collection: Wise
Try as they may to savor the taste of eternity, their thoughts still twist and turn upon the ebb and flow of things in past and future time. But if only their minds could be seized and held steady, they would be still for a while and, for that short moment, they would glimse the splendor of eternity, which is forever still.Collection: Past
Singing is a lover's thing.Collection: Faith
Do you who are a Christian desire to be revenged and vindicated, and the death of Jesus Christ has not yet been revenged, nor His innocence vindicated?Collection: Christian
Why persist in walking difficult and toilsome paths? There is no repose where you are seeking it. Search as you like, it is not where you are looking. You are seeking a happy life in the realm of death, and it will not be found there. How could life be happy where there is no life at all?Collection: Happy Life
Human law cannot punish or forbid all evil, since while doing away with evils it would do away with many good things, which would hinder the advance of the common good.Collection: Law
Poltinus the Platonist proves by means of the blossoms and leaves that from the Supreme God, whose beauty is invisible and ineffable, Providence reaches down to the things of earth here below. He points out that these frail and mortal objects could not be endowed with a beauty so immaculate and so exquisitely wrought, did they not issue from the Divinity which endlessly prevades with its invisible and unchanging beauty all things.Collection: Mean
He who labours, prays.Collection: Praying
It is not earthly riches which make us or our sons happy; for they must either be lost by us in our lifetime, or be possessed when we are dead, by whom we know not, or perhaps by whom we would not.Collection: Son
They the hazers or eversores were rightly called Overturners, since they had themselves been first overturned and perverted, tricked by those same devils who were secretly mocking them in the very acts by which they amused themselves in mocking and making fools of others.Collection: Devil
All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they torment freshly-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless new-born infants.Collection: Christian
My love is my weight. Because of it, I move.Collection: Love
Cyprian was not issuing a new decree but was keeping to the most solid belief of the Church in order to correct some who thought that infants ought not be baptized before the eighth day after their birth. . . . He agreed with certain of his fellow bishops that a child is able to be duly baptized as soon as he is born.Collection: Children
He that loveth little prayeth little, he that loveth much prayeth much.Collection: Prayer
Great are those two gifts, wisdom and continence: wisdom, forsooth, whereby we are formed in the knowledge of God; continence whereby we are not conformed to this world.Collection: Two
The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.Collection: Travel
Salvation is God’s way of making us real people.Collection: Real