They love truth when it reveals itself, and they hate it when it reveals themselves.
There is a joy that brings true happiness, but it is not given to the ungodly. It is only for those who love You for Your own sake. That joy is to know You as You are. This is the happy life, to rejoice in You, of You, and for You.
There are others whose concept of God, such as it is, ascribes to him the nature and moods of the human spirit, a mistake which ties their arguments about God to distorted and misleading rules of interpretation.
Why, therefore, do we delay to abandon our hopes of this world, and give ourselves wholly to seek after God and the blessed life? But.
The same thing which is now called Christian religion existed among the ancients. They have begun to call 'Christian' the true religion which existed before.
Evidently there is difficulty, real difficulty, in learning a foreign language at all, as if it sprinkled all the sweet flavor of the Greek mythical stories with a foul taste.
Some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others to be enjoyed and used.
You are not the mind itself. For You are the Lord God of the mind. All these things are liable to change, but You remain immutable above all things.
Music, that is the science or the sense of proper modulation, is likewise given by God's generosity to mortals having rational souls in order to lead them to higher things.
Your best servant is the person who does not attend so much to hearing what he himself wants as to willing what he has heard from you.
Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.
My weight is my love.
Tolle, lege: take up and read.
Variation on the middle sentence: A thing is not necessarily false because it is badly expressed, nor true because it is expressed magnificently.
But I am aware of some that murmur: What, say they, if all men should abstain from all sexual intercourse, whence will the human race exist? Would that all would this, only in charity out of a pure heart, and good conscience, and faith unfeigned; much more speedily would the City of God be filled, and the end of the world hastened.
Yet when it happens to me that the music moves me more than the subject of the song, I confess myself to commit a sin deserving punishment, and then I would prefer not to have heard the singer.
The Holy Scriptures are our letters from home.
But he does not enter into temptation if he conquers his evil concupiscence by good will. And yet the determination of the human will is insufficient, unless the Lord grant it victory in answer to prayer that it enter not into temptation. What, indeed, affords clearer evidence of the grace of God than the acceptance of prayer in any petition?
Can human folly harbour a more arrogant or ungrateful thought than the notion that whereas God makes man beautiful in body, man makes himself pure in heart?
I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.
In my deepest wound I saw your glory, and it dazzled me.
Let such a person rejoice even to ask the question, "What does this mean?" Yes, let him rejoice in that, and choose to find by not finding rather than by finding fail to find you.
The dominion of good men is profitable, not so much for themselves as for human affairs. But the dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater licence in wickedness;
Bad company is like a nail driven into a post, which, after the first and second blow, may be drawn out with little difficulty; but being once driven up to the head, the pincers cannot take hold to draw it out, but which can only be done by the destruction of the wood.
He that becomes protector of sin shall surely become its prisoner.
Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.
No one learns except by friendship.
The nature of God can never and nowhere be deficient in anything, while things made out of nothing can be deficient.
There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.
It is a higher glory... to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with the sword, and to procure or maintain peace by peace, not by war.
But Thou who fillest all things, fillest Thou them with Thy whole self? or, since all things cannot contain Thee wholly, do they contain part of Thee? and all at once the same part? or each its own part, the greater more, the smaller less?
You stir us to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
Will is to grace as the horse is to the rider.
Why does a man like to be made sad by viewing doleful and tragic scenes, which he himself could not by any means endure? Yet, as a spectator, he wishes to experience from them a sense of grief, and in this very sense of grief his pleasure consists. What is this but wretched madness?
If, on the contrary, they hear from you about themselves, they will be in no position to say, The Lord is lying. Is hearing the truth about oneself from you anything different from knowing oneself? And can anyone have this self-knowledge and still protest, It is not true, unless he himself is lying?
The past times that you think were good, are good because they are not yours here and now.
What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.
My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is.
The Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them.
He then goes on to show that love--the love of God for.
I was in love with loving.
Order brings peace.
But I, a most wretched youth, most wretched from the very start of my youth, had even sought chastity from you, and had said, Give me chastity and continence, but not yet! For I feared that you would hear me quickly, and that quickly you would heal me of that disease of lust, which I wished to have satisfied rather than extinguished.
It is solved by walking.
I err, therefore I am.
The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
What grace is meant to do is to help good people, not to escape their sufferings, but to bear them with a stout heart, with a fortitude that finds its strength in faith.
If the things of this world delight you, praise God for them but turn your love away from them and give it to their Maker, so that in the things that please you you may not displease him.
Free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under Your Law.
