Quotes by Augustine of Hippo

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God is closer and more comprehensible to us than sensible, material things, and that is why we know him more easily.

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If there is no evil, then the very fear of evil is evil.

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The life of the speaker has more significance than any speech.

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A bad man hurts himself before he hurts another.

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Evil is also what man does and what he endures. The first is a sin, the second - a punishment. Man does the evil he wishes, and endures that which he does not wish.

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What are we made of? From spirit and body. Which one is better? The spirit, of course.

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Love and do what you want.

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When men think of God whom they cannot understand, they are really thinking of themselves, and not of Him; they do not compare Him, but themselves, they do not want to know Him, but themselves.

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When you are glorified, remember that it is not you who is glorified, but He who works through you.

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Who hates the world? Those who tore up the truth.

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Let's listen to the other side as well.

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Whatever he understands to doubt, he understands this doubt as a kind of truth.

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Genuine is the man himself, it is easier to count his hairs than the feelings and movements of the heart.

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Believe so you can understand.

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The will in us is always free, but not always good.

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Time heals wounds.

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Everyone wants to be holy, but not everyone can.

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Human misfortunes arise from the fact that we enjoy what we ought to use and use what ought to delight us.

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Everyone likes a wonderful horse, but no one wants to become a horse.

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Whosoever, agrees to weep when in his right mind than to laugh when he is mad.

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Anyone who knows his measure is wise, i.e. holy.

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You can drive away the love of the transient only by feeling the sweetness of the eternal.

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People feel exactly as much suffering as is given to them.

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Perfection lies in man's knowledge of his own imperfection.

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Do good, and do so not for the sake of your own fame, but for the sake of Him to whom you owe the opportunity to do good.

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In your own name you are only able to do evil; the good you do comes from God.

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The way souls merge with bodies is absolutely amazing and completely unfathomable to man, but still, that's man.

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The most just punishment for sin is for man to lose what he did not want to use properly.

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He who is good is free, even if he is a slave; he who is evil is a slave, even if he is a king.

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What can be more repulsive, what gathers upon man more wrath for the day of the pure Judgment of the Lord, if not joy in the face of another's misfortune, when man resembles the devil?

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What I understand, that is what I believe; but not everything I believe and understand. Everything I understand, that's what I know, but I don't believe everything I know. Therefore, although there are many things that I cannot know, it is useful to believe in them.

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I want to know God and soul and nothing more.

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Holy God! You did not create the earth and the sky from Yourself, for then they would have been like You. Yet, even apart from You there was nothing that You could have created for Them. As a result, You created them out of nothing.

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Hiding the truth is either a test of our humility or a humiliation of pride.

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Do not go out into the world, but return to yourself: inside man is the truth.

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Don't use my books as canonical writings, but if, in the latter, you find something you didn't believe before, believe it. From my books do not hold firmly what you did not find worthy of belief before unless you understand that they are worthy of belief.

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Do not make final judgments!

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Flaws disappear, but the essence remains.

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There is no happy life but that lived in philosophy.

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No one is able to find God, but do not believe in advance what you will find out later.

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Just as sometimes mercy punishes, so sometimes cruelty can spare.

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Let them be angry with you who do not know with what efforts the truth is found and how hard it is to keep from error.

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Reason is the gaze of the soul, with the help of which it alone, without the mediation of the body, illuminates the true things.

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The obvious truth that leaves man cold, charms him when revealed to him in an allegory.

"The evildoer harms himself first, before he harms others."

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This is what a man loves so much in a good friend that he feels remorse if he does not give affection for affection, love for love, even though his senses expect nothing but signs of friendly goodwill.

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Like a person disappointed in an ignorant doctor, he is usually reluctant to entrust himself to a good doctor, such was the state of my soul. He could not be healed without faith, but he was reluctant to accept the treatment in order not to fall into false faith.

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When I first shot Writing, I didn't think the way I'm talking now. Then I saw that the Holy Scriptures cannot even be mentioned on the same day as Cicero's great book. My scholarly pride did not like his modesty, but my understanding could not penetrate its depths. However, this book is such that it grows with those who start reading it with a child's spirit; but I, in my inflated and self-pleasing greatness, deemed it unworthy of me to lower myself to the level of a child.

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This book will never be closed, this writing will never be unrolled from them, because you are their book, their writing forever; for you have exalted them above the strength of your writing. You ordered the Holy Scriptures above the weakness of the human race living below, so that it would have something to look up to and know your compassion, which through the unfathomable course of time constantly bears witness to you, the creator of the times.

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When I turn to my memory and order it to perform this or that according to my command, some things come up immediately, others only after a long search, as if from more hidden drawers. There are things that swarm, and when a person wants or is looking for something else, they always jump there, as if asking: aren't we? In such cases, I push them away from the face of my memory with a wave of my soul, until it is cleared and what I am looking for comes from its hiding place.

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Do you want to know what love is like? See where it leads.

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If the truth is no longer respected, or even slightly diminished in esteem, everything becomes doubtful.

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What we see is true.

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Everything that knowledge encompasses is limited by the perception of the knowing being.

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Someone beautifully said that his friend is "half of his soul". I felt the same way; my soul fused with his was one soul in two bodies. And maybe I hated to live longer because I didn't want a half-life; and I was afraid to die, lest the one I loved so much should die completely with me and in me.

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Oh truth, truth! How much I longed for you from the bottom of my soul, when you were constantly and in all respects mentioned before me - in empty words and in a huge thick book! What was served on these trays as my wish for you? The sun, the moon, your beautiful creations, but still only your works and not you! And not even the most worthy of your works! Because these are bright and heavenly bodies, but your enthusiastic creations still take precedence. And my hungry, thirsty longing did not desire your things, even though they were the first, but you, Truth, in whom there is no change, no shadow of change.

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I didn't know that God is a soul, therefore it has no parts, no length and width, no mass, because the mass is directly smaller in any part than in the whole. So even if I assume that it is infinite, the part defined by a certain space would be smaller than the infinite whole, so it cannot be in its entirety everywhere exactly where it is. And the soul is like that, and so is God.

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Faith means that one believes what one does not yet see. And the reward of this faith is that you will see what you believe.

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I owe everything I am to my mother.

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The happy life: joy in the truth.

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My memory also preserves the feelings of my soul. Not in the way that the soul itself feels them when it is attacked, but in a completely different way: according to the nature of the remembering power itself.

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So what's the time? If no one asks, I know; if they ask me and I want to explain, I don't know.

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Sir, you advised a better way than what you allowed.

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The dead are invisible, but they are present.

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We must pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended on us.

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I stood with my back to the light and my face to the illuminated objects, so naturally my face, which was looking at the illuminated objects, could not receive light.

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If you listen, listen out of love. When you speak, speak out of love. If you warn, warn out of love. If you forgive, forgive out of love.

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It is better to limp along the right path than to keep going in the wrong direction with firm steps.

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The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.

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He can always give to those whose hearts are full of love. Love doesn't need a full wallet.

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We should love our fellow man either because he is good or to be good.

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The value of a person is not determined by how much he knows, but by how much love he has.

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What you want to ignite in others must burn within you.

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A person becomes perfect precisely by shedding light on his own imperfection.

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There are four distractions to our mental peace: desire, joy, sadness and fear.

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A love that ends was never real.

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The law that is given to you sounds short: love and do what you want!

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It's not a big deal to start a good thing. Completing it is the only thing that makes a person perfect.

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You admire the height of the mountains, (...) the shores of the ocean and the course of the stars, but you forget that there is nothing more wonderful than the human soul.

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To the degree that love grows in you, to the degree that your beauty grows, because love is the beauty of the soul.

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People travel to marvel at the heights of mountains, the giant waves of the sea, the long bends of rivers, the immeasurable expanse of the oceans, the movement of the stars in the sky, and they pass by without wondering.

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Find what you're looking for, but it's not where you're looking. You are rushing towards a happy life in the land of death, but there is no happy life there.

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Nothing convinces but the truth, nothing saves but love.

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Love can be measured by whether someone loves you unconditionally.

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I became dead so that I could live.

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Just as the root of all evil is selfishness, so the root of all good is love. Without him the rich are poor, with him the poor are rich.

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Man naturally longs for both joy and truth, but he often looks for both in the wrong places.

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True friendship presupposes love, which leads to tenderness, trust, which does not worry about the possibility of our friend's infidelity, freedom, which is not afraid to express one's opinion, a sense of belonging, which can give generously and receive with joy.

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Miracles do not contradict natural laws, only what we know about nature.