Saint Augustine

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.

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.

Every day my conscience makes confession relying on the hope of Your mercy as more to be trusted than its own innocence.

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.

The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind commands the hand to move, and it so easy that one hardly distinguishes the order from its execution. Yet mind is mind and hand is body. The mind orders the mind to will. The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it.

You are my Lord, because You have no need of my goodness.

I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.

The Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them.

The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.

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.

Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.

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.

Yet we must say something when those who say the most are saying nothing.

He cannot have God for his Father who will not have the Church for his mother.

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.

How high a price we pay for the burden of habit! I am fitted for life here where I do not want to be, I want to live there but am unfit for it, and on both counts I am miserable.

I will plant my feet on that step where my parents put me as a child, until self-evident truth comes to light.

God gives where he finds empty hands.

Narrow is the mansion of my soul; enlarge Thou it, that Thou mayest enter in. It is ruinous; repair Thou it. It has that within which must offend Thine eyes; I confess and know it. But who shall cleanse it? or to whom should I cry, save Thee? Lord, cleanse me from my secret faults, and spare Thy servant from the power of the enemy. I believe, and therefore do I speak.

A person can do other things against his will, but belief is possible only in one who is willing.

To my God a heart of flame; To my fellow man a heart of love; To myself a heart of steel.