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“Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”
― Augustine of Hippo

“Is it not lack of faith that leads men to fear the scrutiny of reason? If the destination is doubtful, than the path must be fraught with fear. A robust faith need not fear, for if God exists, then reason cannot help but lead us to Him. Cogito, ergo Deus est,'says St. Augustine, I think, therefore God is.”
― Donna Woolfolk Cross, Pope Joan

“Saint Augustine defined idolatry as worshiping what should be used or using what should be worshiped”
― Colin S. Smith, The 10 Greatest Struggles of Your Life

“Gregor flushed as he went on: "The entire content of the Confesions could be put into one single sentence in the book: when Augustine addresses God, saying: 'Thou hast made us for Thyself and our heart is unquiet until it rests in Thee.' This sentence, my lords and friends, is immortal. It contains the very heart of religion.”
― Louis de Wohl The Restless Flame

“St. Augustine said, "The very pleasures of human life men acquire by difficulties." There are times when the entire arrangement of our existence is disrupted and we long then for just one ordinary day - seeing our ordinary life as greatly desirable, even wonderful, in the light of the terrible disruption that has taken place. Difficulty opens our eyes to pleasures we had taken for granted.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, Keep a Quiet Heart

“Some would argue for the third possibility on the grounds that, if there were a complete set of laws, that would infringe God's freedom to change his mind and intervene in the world. It's a bit like the old paradox: Can God make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it? But the idea that God might want to change his mind is an example of the fallacy, pointed out by St. Augustine, of imagining God as a being existing in time: time is a property only of the universe that God created. Presumably, he knew what he intended when he set it up!”
― stephen hawking, A Brief History of Time

“Stay away from St. Augustine: skillfully formulated subjectivity is not theology, not by a long shot, and it's harmful to young souls. Nothing but journalism with a few dialectical features. You won't take offense at this advice?"
"No," I said, "I shall immediately go and throw my St. Augustine into the fire."
"That's right," he said almost jubilantly, "into the fire with him. God bless you." I was on the point of saying Thank you, but it didn't seem appropriate, so I merely hung up and wiped the sweat off my face.”
― Heinrich Böll, The Clown

“There is much: recognition of the fact that human beings live indeterminate and incomplete lives; recognition of the power exerted over and upon us by our own habits and memories; recognition of the ways in which the world presses in on all of us, for it is an intractable place where many things go awry and go astray, where one may all-too-easily lose one’s very self. The epistemological argument is framed by faith, but it stands on its own as an account of willing, nilling, memory, language, signs, affections, delight, the power and the limits of minds and bodies. To the extent that a prideful philosophy refuses to accept these, Augustine would argue, to that extent philosophy hates the human condition itself.”
― Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics

“No one should be ashamed to admit that they do not know what they do not know, in case while feigning knowledge, they come to deserve to never know.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Letters of St. Augustine

“By far the highest type of religious thought among the Ancients was that of their philosophers. With Saint Augustine, on the contrary, a new age was beginning, in which by far the highest type of philosophical thinking would be that of the theologians. True enough, even the faith of an Augustinian presupposes a certain exercise of natural reason. We cannot believe something, be it the word of God Himself, unless we find some sense in the formulas which we believe. And it can hardly be expected that we will believe in God's Revelation, unless we be given good reasons to think that such a Revelation has indeed taken place.”
― Étienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages

“Theologically, Hell is out of favor now, but it still seems more "real" to most people than Fairyland or Atlantis or Valhalla or other much imagined places. This is because of the sheer mass and weight and breadth of ancient tradition, inventive fantasy, analytic argument, dictatorial dogma, and both simple and complex faith employed over a very long time- thousands of years- in the ongoing attempt to map the netherworld. The landscape of Hell is the largest shared construction project in imaginative history, and its chief architects have been creative giants- Homer, Virgil, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Bosch, Michelangelo, Milton, Goethe, Blake, and more.”
― Alice K. Turner, The History of Hell

“My eyes sought him everywhere, but they did not see him; and I hated all places because he was not in them, because they could not say to me, “Look, he is coming,��

And I marveled that other mortals went on living since he whom I had loved as if he would never die was now dead. And I marveled all the more that I, who had been a second self to him, could go on living when he was dead. Someone spoke rightly of his friend as being “his soul’s other half��--for I felt that my soul and his soul were but one soul in two bodies. Consequently, my life was now a horror to me because I did not want to live as a half self. But it may have been that I was afraid to die, lest he should then die wholly whom I had so greatly loved.”
― Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of St Augustine

“I read in a "high-class" review of Miss Rebecca West's book on St. Augustine, the astounding statement that the Catholic Church regards sex as having the nature of sin. How marriage can be a sacrament if sex is a sin, or why it is the Catholics who are in favour of birth and their foes in favour of birth-control, I will leave to the critic to worry out for himself. (chapter 4)”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“Grant what Thou commandest, and command what Thou dost desire.”
― Saint Augustine

“A mosaic of memories takes me back to my own childhood, and then to my children. My earliest memory of St. Augustine was a day trip from Jacksonville; a day with some neighbors who were nice enough to purchase me a plastic toy-tugboat with a blue superstructure and white hull. Other accounts meld into my adult years. With its history and attractions, The Ancient City is pristine and picturesque by most accounts; but from the Newer Jail (not the Old Jail) , the perspective is very different.”
― H. Kirk Rainer

“The topic was eloquence, something Christians had been conflicted about since the first-century church when Paul wrote that in bringing the gospel, he did not come with “eloquence.�� A few centuries later, Saint Augustine wrestled with the value of eloquence, associating it with his pagan background and training in Greek rhetoric while simultaneously employing it winsomely in his Christian writings. Such suspicion of beauty and form, whether in art, literature, speech, or human flesh, has shadowed Christian thought throughout the history of the church; sadly so, considering God is the author of all beauty.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist

“Descending south into St. Augustine’s Historic District along A1A, visitors are immediately confronted by an edifice which serves as a stark reminder that the city was originally founded as a military outpost, deep in hostile territory. Jutting up like a molar from the defensive teeth of the Ancient City is the forbidding fortress of Castillo de San Marcos, a coquina fortification which has served many roles it its nearly three hundred fifty year history.”
― James Caskey

“St. Augustine is not only the oldest continuously-occupied European settlement on the American continent, it is also perhaps the most haunted city in the United States. Seemingly every spot in this city has some ghostly hidden history, right below the surface. Just by strolling through the historic streets you can hear the whispers of the long-dead.”
― James Caskey, St. Augustine Ghosts: Hauntings in the Ancient City

“St. Augustine: “The Church is a whore, but she’s my mother.�� She is a mess and has many illegitimate children. But she is also our momma and managed to give birth to us and to give us enough of the truth that we have been able to ask the questions that we have in this book.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“In esoteric traditions, such conceptual schemes are considered a function of conditioning, not an inherent part of what is. Nonduality abides no contrast or comparison, no distinction between this and that, and no sequence of before and after. Beneath the surface play of phenomena, there is a formless, undifferentiated realm invisible to the naked eye; devoid of all parts, there remains only the unceasing flow and energy of life. Any concept of the Divine, therefore, is misleading, as it stands in the way of the deepest insights into the nature of reality. "God" is a concept, and, as such, is considered a misguided attempt to capture the infinite in the finite--to limit that which is limitless. As Mariana Caplan points out, "it is our imagination of God that fails," not God who fails us. St. Augustine voiced the same insight sixteen hundred years ago when he said God was not what we imagine or think we understand.”
― John Greer, Seeing, Knowing, Being: A Guide to Sacred Awakenings

“Enslaved people began to flee harsh conditions in Virginia and South Carolina to Spanish Florida [in the 1680s]. If an enslaved person made it there and professed his belief that Roman Catholicism was "the True Faith," the Spanish colonists would set him free. As a result, the first Black town, St. Augustine, was founded by freedmen and -women in 1687.”
― Laurence Ralph, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“identity is our name for being found by a story someone else told.”
― James K.A. Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

“As I sat on a bench in Stuyvesant Park gazing at the fountain I thought about the nature of miracles. Miracles of science like the MRI machine I'd just spent some time in. The miracle of a lost man being looked over by the angels. The miracle of a tree that's grown for over 200 years. All around us are miracles if we merely open our eyes to God's grace and glory. ... the words of St. Augustine. 'Miracles are not a contradiction to nature. They are only in contradiction with what we know of nature.”
― Edward Grinnan, A Journey of Faith: A Mother's Alzheimer's, A Son's Love, and His Search for Answers

“According to St. Augustine of Hippo (354��430), “The highest good, than which there is no higher, is God �� And consequently, if He alone is unchangeable, all things that He has made, because He has made them out of nothing, are changeable.�� Augustine also used the idea of logoi spermatikoi in the context of seminal reasons (rationes seminales, Latin from the Greek λόγοι σπερματικο�� or logoi spermatikoi), or “seedlike principles,�� “causal principles.�� Based on this theory, God created the world by inseminating the void with seed. Other Christian thinkers accepted the idea, including Justin Martyr (100��165), Athenagoras of Athens (133��190), Tertullian (155��220), Gregory of Nyssa (335��395), Bonaventure (1221��1274), Albertus Magnus (1200��1280), and Roger Bacon (1219/20��1292).”
― Dejan Stojanovic, ABSOLUTE