The angels surround and help the priest when he is celebrating Mass.
Saint AugustineRead
In order to discover the character of people we have only to observe what they love.
Interpretation
The true nature of individuals is revealed by their passions and affections.
Saint Augustine's quote emphasizes that understanding a person's character can be achieved by observing their loves and what they hold dear. The things that individuals are most passionate about reveal their values, priorities, and ultimately their true selves.
In practice
In a leadership workshop discussing team values, one might quote Augustine to illustrate the importance of understanding team members' passions.
The angels surround and help the priest when he is celebrating Mass.
There is no health in those who are displeased by an element in Your creation, just as there was none in me when I was displeased by many things You had made. Because my soul didn't dare to say that my God displeased me, it refused to attribute to You whatever was displeasing.
Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.
Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul? Man is a great depth, O Lord. The hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feeling, the movements of his heart.
Whatever skills I have acquired, whatever gifts I have been given, I place them at Your service.
Everyone who observes himself doubting observes a truth, and about that which he observes he is certain; therefore he is certain about a truth. Everyone therefore who doubts whether truth exists has in himself a truth on which not to doubt.... Hence one who can doubt at all ought not to doubt the existence of truth.
National languages are all huge systems of vested interests which sullenly resist critical inquiry.
The "discovery" of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the "discovery" of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.
I wonder if it hurts to live, And if they have to try, And whether, could they choose between, They would not rather die.
I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.
No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily.
Through fear of resembling one another, through horror of having to submit, through uncertainty as well, through skepticism and complexity, there is a multitude of individual little beliefs for the triumph of strange little individuals.
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