Augustine Quotes - Page 2

• You know, Saint Augustine said our hearts are restless 'til they rest in thee. And I had a restlessness in my heart. Something just wasn't quite right.

  Pat Robertson

  Heart, Saint, Restless

  "Conversations with Michael Eisner", www.nbcnews.com. June 20, 2006.

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• St. Augustine explicitly warns against a very narrow perspective that will put our faith at risk of looking ridiculous. If you step back from that one narrow interpretation, what the Bible describes is very consistent with the Big Bang.

  Richard Dawkins

  Perspective, Risk, Bangs

  Source: inters.org

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• Augustine of Hippo used to say that, but for God's grace, he should have been capable of committing any crime; and it is when we feel this sincerely, that we are most likely to be really improving, and best able to give assistance to others without moral loss to ourselves.

  Henry Parry Liddon

  Loss, Should Have, Giving

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". P. 547. Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, 1895.

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• The reality is, if you go to the library and read biographies, thousands of people have changed, radically changed. St. Augustine was one of them. He lived a terrible a life for the first 33 years, and then he radically changed.

  Gary Chapman

  Reality, Years, People

  Source: www.crosswalk.com

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• There's a huge amount of work on Adam and Eve, from the ancient world to the present. Saint Augustine was obsessed with them.I don't know if it helps my research, but I get a big kick out of Mark Twain, who wrote "The Diaries of Adam and Eve." He wrote very funny stuff on them. I sometimes read things that are loosely related to what I'm thinking and writing about.

  Stephen Greenblatt

  Writing, Thinking, Saint

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx.

  David Stove

  Religious, Powerful, Plato

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• The fact is that philosophy has been a decisive source of inspiration in all the great crises that Europe has faced. It has been so in the time that preceded the fall of the Roman Empire, when Augustine of Hippo delineated the features of a new spiritual civilization; in the age of religious wars, when Descartes and Hobbes established the principles of modern science and politics; and at the turn of the French Revolution, interpreted by Kant and Hegel as an event destined to change the history of the world.

  Roberto Esposito

  Spiritual, Religious, Philosophy

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• We were born in a Jewish world, as part of a Jewish faith tradition. We had to translate ourselves into the neo-Platonic thinking Greek world; that took us about 400 years. Then, finally a man named Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, recast Christianity in terms of neo-Platonic thought.

  John Shelby Spong

  Men, Thinking, Years

  Source: mormon-chronicles.blogspot.com

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• Christianity in the West, opens up a perspective of depth into what it means to be a self. And that depth of the self is something that is experienced in the sight of God. So that the great thinkers of self and subjectivity are Paul and Augustine. They look at the self from the perspective of God and they find themselves wretched and interesting. Constituted by conflictual desires.

  Simon Critchley

  Mean, Sight, Self

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• Augustine said that we were all born into the world of "common grace" [i.e., available to all]. Before one is baptized, or even if one never is, such grace meets one in God's creation. There is grace in the pear tree that blooms and blushes. There is common grace in the sea (that massive cleanliness which we are proceeding to corrupt), in the fact that there was, before we laid hands on it, clean air. Our task is to appreciate that grace.

  Joseph Sittler

  Sea, Air, Hands

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• The moment that the state came into conflict with the higher power, the moment that it set itself up as an end in itself, it became identified with Augustine's earthly city and lost all claims to a higher sanction than the law of force and self-interest. Without justice, what is a great kingdom but a great robbery, magnum latrocinium?

  Christopher Dawson

  Self, Law, Cities

  Christopher Dawson (1932). “The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity”, p.174, CUA Press

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• So saving grace, converting grace, for Augustine, is God's giving us a sovereign joy in God that triumphs over all other joys and therefore sways the will. The will is free to move toward whatever it delights in most fully, but it is not within the power of our will to determine what that sovereign joy will be.

  John Piper

  Moving, Giving, Joy

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• It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed (Aquinas).

  Sam Harris

  Religion, Church, Should

  "Letter to a Christian Nation". Book by Sam Harris, 2006.

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• To each of my Nephews, William Augustine Washington, George Lewis, George Steptoe Washington, Bushrod Washington, and Samuel Washington, I give one of my swords or Cutteaux of which I may be Possesed; and they are to chuse in the order they are named. These Swords are accompanied with an injuction not to unsheath them for the purpose of shedding blood, except it be for self defense, or in the defense of their Country and its rights; and in the latter case, to keep them unsheathed, and prefer falling with them in their hands, to the relenquishment thereof.

  George Washington

  Country, War, Fall

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• [Milton's] argument is (a) St. Augustine was wrong in thinking God's only purpose in giving Adam a female, instead of a male, companion, was copulation. For (b) there is a "peculiar comfort" in the society of man and woman "beside, (i.e. in addition to, apart from) the genial bed"; and (c) we know from Scripture that something analogous to "play" or "slackening the cords" occurs even in God. That is why the Song of Songs describes a thousand raptures...far on the hither side of carnal enjoyment.

  C. S. Lewis

  Song, Men, Thinking

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• Before deciding what to do about national space policy, Obama set up an outside review panel of space experts, headed up by my friend Norm Augustine, former head of Lockheed Martin and a former government official.

  Buzz Aldrin

  Government, Space, Experts

  "President Obama’s JFK Moment" by Buzz Aldrin, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 5, 2010.

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• For many people, feminism is one of those words of which, as St. Augustine said about time, they know the meaning as long as no one is asking.

  Katha Pollitt

  Long, People, Feminism

  Katha Pollitt (1995). “Reasonable creatures: essays on women and feminism”

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• Did a Magdalene, a Paul, a Constantine, an Augustine become mountains of ice after their conversion? Quite the contrary. We should never have had these prodigies of conversion and marvelous holiness if they had not changed the flames of human passion into volcanoes of immense love of God.

  Frances Xavier Cabrini

  Faith, Inspiration, Passion

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• As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe.

  Stephen Hawking

  People, Religion, Firsts

  Stephen Hawking (2009). “A Brief History Of Time: From Big Bang To Black Holes”, p.13, Random House

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• I would inquire of reasonable persons whether this principle: Matter is naturally wholly incapable of thought, and this other: I think, therefore I am, are in fact the same in the mind of
  Descartes, and in that of St. Augustine, who said the same thing twelve hundred years before.

  Blaise Pascal

  Thinking, Years, Mind

  Blaise Pascal, Henry Rogers, Victor Cousin, Charles Louandre (1859). “The Thoughts, Letters and Opuscules of Blaise Pascal”, p.510

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• Loving difficult people will refine us. Perhaps only in heaven will our love be so perfected that we can actually like these people, too. St. Augustine spoke of a man who, on earth, had chronic gas problems; in heaven, his flatulence became perfect music.

  Scott Hahn

  Love Is, Men, People

  Scott Hahn (2002). “The Lamb's Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth”, p.154, Image

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• According to St. Bonaventure, all the angels in heaven unceasingly call out to her: "Holy, holy, holy Mary, Virgin Mother of God." They greet her countless times each day with the angelic greeting, "Hail, Mary", while prostrating themselves before her, begging her as a favour to honour them with one of her requests. According to St. Augustine, even St. Michael, though prince of all the heavenly court, is the most eager of all the angels to honour her and lead others to honour her. At all times he awaits the privilege of going at her word to the aid of one of her servants.

  Louis de Montfort

  Mother, Angel, Heaven

  Saint Louis de Montfort (2016). “True Devotion to Mary: Saint Louis de Montfort”, p.9, Danka

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• The barbarians, who possessed no books, no secular knowledge, no education, except in the schools of the clergy, and who had scarcely acquired the rudiments of religious instruction, turned with childlike attachment to men whose minds were stored with the knowledge of Scripture, of Cicero, of St. Augustine; and in the scanty world of their ideas, the Church was felt to be something infinitely vaster, stronger, holier than their newly founded States.

  Lord Acton

  Religious, Book, School

  Lord Acton (2016). “The History of Freedom: Great Event”, p.29, VM eBooks

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• Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like Saint Augustine could express in incomparable terms: 'Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!'.

  Pope John Paul II

  Faith, Dream, Inspiration

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• The slow-witted approach to the HIV epidemic was the result of a thousand years of Christian malpractice and the childlike approach of the church to sexuality. If any single man was responsible, it was Augustine of Hippo who murdered his way to sainthood spouting on about the sins located in his genitals.

  Derek Jarman

  Christian, Men, Epidemics

  Derek Jarman (1993). “At Your Own Risk: A Saint's Testament”

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