Famous phrases Saint Augustine, timeless aphorisms and confessions about love and friendship, thoughts and words about life and death, maxims and quotes about beauty, science, baptism and charity, invitation to humility and to live righteously every day with perseverance.
Quotes Saint Augustine
- The friendship of men is sweet because with a knot of affection it makes many souls one soul.
- The ship of the heart is always struck by the wave of thoughts, and is pushed here and there without cessation.
- Late I loved you, beauty so old and so new, late I loved you. Yes, because you were inside me and I was outside. I was looking for you there. Deformed, I threw myself on the beautiful forms of your creatures. You were with me, and I was not with you. Your creatures kept me away from you, non-existent if they didn't exist in you. You called me, and your cry broke through my deafness; you flashed, and your splendor dispelled my blindness; you spread your fragrance, and I breathed and I long for you, I tasted and I am hungry and thirsty; you touched me, and burned with desire for your peace.
- As friends flatter pervert, so enemies, with reproaches, many times correct.
- Love and do what you want; whether you keep silent, keep silent for love; whether you speak, speak for love; whether you correct, correct for love; whether you forgive, forgive for love; may the root of love be in you, since from this root cannot proceed except the good.
- There is no harm big enough not to have to be done to avoid a worse one.
- All love either ascends or descends; it depends on desire: if it is good we rise to God, if it is bad we fall into the abyss.
- People travel to marvel at the mountains, seas, rivers, stars; and pass by themselves without wonder.
- Love and persevere in love; I will not defraud your love, I who have cleansed your heart.
- Nobody acts well against the will, even if what he does is good.
Recommended readings- Phrases of St. Dominic of Guzman: biography
- Phrases of Santa Gemma Galgani: quotes and aphorisms
- Phrases of Saint Anthony of Padua: quotes, aphorisms
- Phrases of San Filippo Neri: famous aphorisms from the writings
- Phrases of San Camillo de Lellis: quotes and thoughts
- If you have charity, you will have everything; without charity nothing will benefit you, whatever you have.
- Faith is believing in what we don't see; and the reward for this faith is seeing what we believe.
- Even the poor have something to help each other: one can lend his legs to the lame, the other the blind eyes to guide him; yet another can visit the sick.
- Add science to charity, and science will be useful to you, not alone, but because of charity.
- Time does not exist, it is only a dimension of the soul. The past does not exist as it is no longer, the future does not exist as it has yet to be, and the present is only a non-existent instant of separation between past and future.
- Give me what you command, command me what you want.
- Whoever does not want to serve charity must necessarily serve iniquity.
- To learn what you need, no age seems too late.
- The simulation of humility is worse than pride.
- Your old age is of a boy, and your childhood of an old man; I mean, don't be wise with pride, don't be humble without wisdom.
- The way in which the spirit is united to the body cannot be understood by man, and yet man consists in this union.
- It is better to have less needs than to have more things.
- God provides the wind but man must raise the sails.
- I had become a big problem for myself.
Aphorisms of St. Augustine
- By giving yourself, how could you be afraid of getting lost? On the contrary, you would lose yourself by refusing to give yourself.
- The first way is humility, the second humility, the third humility, and how many times you will ask me, many times I will answer the same thing.
- Live every day of your life as if it were the last.
- Those we love, but we have lost, are no longer where they were, but are always wherever we are.
- Great is the sin of pride, and it is the origin and cause of all sins.
- The perfection of man consists precisely in discovering his own imperfections.
- Nothing has the power to drag the spirit of a man as low as the caresses of a woman and that physical relationship that is part of marriage.
- The higher we are placed, the greater the danger we are.
- The true power of God consists not in preventing evil, but in knowing how to draw good from evil.
- The love for truth aspires to the holy idleness of contemplation; the needs of charity load us with necessary work. But if this burden is not imposed on us, we must use our freedom of spirit to seek and contemplate the truth.
- How long is the patient who is thirsty waiting for a glass of water!
- Get over yourself and get over the world.
- Thanksgiving is the first of our duties.
- As you come out of this life, so you will be forever in that life.
- Patience is the companion of wisdom.
- Those who do not like to be overcome by truth, are overcome by error.
- Goodwill cannot go on vacation.
- We never lose those we love, because we can love them in the One who cannot be lost.
- It is better to be corrected by the father's rod than to die in the marauder's caress.
- Love kills what we have been so that we can be what we were not.
- If the husband is the boss, the husband must live better and precede his wife in every good work; so that she imitates her husband and follows her boss.
- Any historical event, however harmful it may be, is always placed on a path that leads to the positive, it always has a constructive meaning.
- Blissful life is therefore rejoicing in the truth.
- Hope has two beautiful children: indignation and courage. Disdain for the reality of things; the courage to change them.
Saint Augustine phrases
- Man generates a man, the dog a dog; and does God not generate God?
- The measure of love is to love without measure.
- The rest, what remains superfluous to you, is necessary for others.
- And men go to contemplate the peaks of the mountains, and the vast waves of the sea, the broad currents of the rivers, the immensity of the ocean, the course of the stars, and pass by themselves without wonder.
- The superfluous of the rich is necessary for the poor. When you have superfluous things you have things that belong to others.
- Teach me sweetness by inspiring charity, teach me discipline by giving me patience and teach me science by illuminating my mind.
- Give what you command and command what you want.
- The world is like a book and those who do not travel know only one page of it.
- Tears are seen, but not heard; tears flow, do not resonate. Yet they have their own voice.
- Late I loved you, beauty so old and so new, late I loved you. And here you were inside me and I was outside, and I was looking for you there. And I, ugly, pounced on the beautiful things you created. You were with me and I was not with you.
- The body emigrates by changing places, the soul moving with affection.
- As love grows within you, so beauty grows. Because love is the beauty of the soul.
- An intact heart is better than an important head.
- Tears are the blood of the soul.
- Anyone who claims to know what he doesn't know is a daredevil; those who say on the contrary that they do not know what they know, show themselves ungrateful.
- God can be better imagined than described, and He exists even more surely than can be imagined.
- It was pride that turned angels into devils; it is humility that makes men equal to angels.
- If we lived righteously every day, even here we would have happy days.
- If justice is not respected, what are States if not large gangs of thieves?
- No one can be truly a friend of man unless he is first of all a friend of the truth: if love is not selfless, it is absolutely not possible.
- It's bad times, men say. They live well and the times will be good. We are the times.
- You, sublime soul and sublime creature, who participate in the divine nature, why seek outside what is in you, more yourself than you?
- He whose gift is full of charity always has something to give.
- Those who have left us are not absent, but invisible, who keep their eyes full of light fixed in our tears.
