These 140 quotes from Saint Augustine offer valuable guidance for those seeking to deepen their Christian faith and Augustinian virtues.
Quotes from Saint Augustine on Love and Charity
“My weight is my love; it carries me wherever I am carried” (C 13,9,10)
“The root is deeply embedded in the ground; where our root is, there is our life, there is our love” (CS 36,s.1 ,3).
“If our love cools, our action becomes numb” (CS 85,24).
“Listen, then, to a brief precept once and for all: love and do what you will; if you are silent, you cry out; you correct, you forgive; be silent, give, correct, forgive, moved by charity. Within is the root of charity; no evil can spring from it” (TCJ 7,8)
“He who crosses over to the side of Christ, passes from fear to love and begins to be able to fulfill with love what he could not with fear” (S 32,8).
“Two loves have given rise to two cities: the love of self to the point of contempt for God, the earthly; and the love of God to the point of contempt for self, the heavenly…” (CD 14,28).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on Friendship
“There is no true friendship except among those whom You bind together through charity” (C 4,4,7).
“Blessed is he who loves you, Lord; and his friend in you, and his enemy for you, because only he who has everyone as friends in Him who cannot be lost will not be able to lose his friend” (C 4,9,14).
“You love your friend when you hate what harms him” (S 49,5).
“You will not find yourself without the friendship of your neighbor where you will have God as a friend” (S 299D,6).
“True friendship is not measured by temporal interests, but is drunk for gratuitous love” (Ca 155,1,1).
“Nothing manifests the friend better than bearing the burden of the friend” (OC 71,1).
“Where there is benevolence there is friendship” (SM 1,11,31).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on the Apostolate
“Do not be wise for yourselves alone. Receive the Spirit. In you there must be a source, never a deposit, from where something can be given, not where it is accumulated. Let the same be said of the saddlebag” (S 101,6).
“Spread the Gospel; what you conceived in your heart, scatter with your mouth. Let the peoples believe when they hear you; let the nations swarm…” (S 116,7).
“The charity of Christ does not allow me to be silent, for whom I desire to conquer all men, as far as it depends on my will” (Ca 105,1.1).
“Let announcing for the Lord be like living for the Lord” (Ca 140,29.70).
“Follow, then, your race and persevere running to the goal; and with the example of your life and with the word of your exhortation drag in your race as many as you can” (BV 23,28).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on the Community
“We are, in effect, all at once and each one in particular, His temples, since He deigns to dwell in the concord of all and in each one in particular” (CD 10,3,2).
“Well, you can, I cannot. Let us keep what each of us has received; let us be inflamed in charity, let us love one another, and in this way I love your strength and you bear my weakness” (S 101,7).
“Since we are talking about the road, let us behave as if we were on the road: the lighter ones, wait for the slower ones and walk all at the same pace” (S 101,9).
“As for spiritual goods, consider yours what you love in your brother, and he consider his what he loves in you” (S 205,2).
“The souls of many men are many too; but, if they love each other, they are one soul” (TEJ 14,9).
“Great power has fraternal concord to make us propitious to God” (TB2,13,18).
“Charity, of which it is written «that it does not seek its own interests», is understood in this way: that it puts common things before its own, not its own before common things” (R 5,2).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on Confession
“When I am bad, confessing to you is nothing other than displeasing myself; and when I am pious, confessing to you is nothing other than not attributing it to myself” (C10,2,2).
“Confession is of two kinds: either of sins or of praises. When things go badly for us, we confess our sins in tribulation; when things go well for us, we confess or pay praises to God in the rejoicing of justice. We never live without confession” (CS 29,2,19).
“The confession of your sins is due to the grace of God. Confess your iniquity, confess the grace of God” (CS 66,6).
“If confession is scorned, there will be no room for mercy. If you make yourself a defender of your sin, how will God be a liberator? So that He may be a liberator, be you an accuser” (CS 68,1,19).
“The Holy Spirit admonishes and exhorts us to offer the sacrifice of confession to God. Confession is either of praise to God or of our sins” (CS 117,1).
“When in sin you accuse yourself, you praise the one who made you without sin” (S 68,3).
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Quotes from Saint Augustine on faith and conversion…
Quotes from Saint Augustine on Conversion
“The new man is born of the old, because spiritual regeneration begins with the change of earthly and worldly life” (CS 8,10).
“The new canticle is the canticle of grace; the new canticle is the canticle of the new man; the new canticle is the canticle of the New Testament” (CS 143,16).
“Fear is the beginning of conversion” (AJ 9,28).
“The conversion of the heart has to be polarized towards God (AJ 28,11).
“Before filling the glass with the good liquid, the bad one must be poured out” (AFe 1,13).
“Do not delay in converting to the Lord.” These words are not mine, but they are also mine; if I love them, they are mine; love them, and they will be yours”(S 339,7).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on the Heart
“You have made us for Yourself, Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You” (C 1,1,1).
“In my heart I am what I am” (C 10,3,4).
“When our heart rises to God, it becomes His altar” (CD 3,2).
“When you enter your room, you enter your heart. Blessed are those who rejoice when they enter their heart and find nothing bad there” (CS 33,s.2,8).
“The cold of charity is the silence of the heart, and the fire of love, the clamor of the heart” (CS 37,14).
“Ask your heart; see if it possesses charity. If it possesses charity, it possesses the fullness of the law, and then God already dwells in you, you have already made yourself the throne of God” (CS 98,3).
“Return. Where to? To the Lord. It is soon yet. Return first to your heart; as in an exile you wander errant outside of yourself. Do you ignore yourself and go in search of who created you?” (TEJ 18,10).
“Give me a loving heart, and it will feel what I say. Give me a heart that desires and is hungry; give me a heart that looks at itself as banished, and that is thirsty, and that sighs for the source of the eternal homeland; give me a heart like that, and it will give perfect account of what I am saying” (TEJ 26,4).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on Christ
“He who calls God our Father, calls Christ brother. Then whoever has God as Father and Christ as brother, does not fear in the evil day” (CS 48,1,8).
“You hear the Master pray; learn to pray; He prayed to teach us to pray, He suffered to teach us to suffer, He rose to teach us to hope for the resurrection”(CS 56,5).
“Fear the Christ above and be benevolent with the Christ below. You have above the giving Christ, you have below the needy Christ. Here he is poor, and he is in the poor” (S 123,4).
“Such is the way: walk through humility to reach eternity. God-Christ is the homeland where we are going; Christ-man, the way through which we are going” (S 123,3).
“We do not go to Christ running, but believing; one does not approach Christ by the movement of the body, but by the affection of the heart” (TEJ 26,3).
“Christ the Lord humbled himself so that we might learn to be humble” (S 272A).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on Desire
“The soul is extended or dilated with the desire of the longed-for thing, not with the joy of what has been achieved” (CS 39,3).
“He who desires, although the tongue is silent, sings with the heart. He who does not desire, although he wounds the ears of men with any clamor, becomes mute to God” (CS 86,1).
“Desire must not be annihilated; its object must be changed” (S 313A,2).
“If you want to change your life, change your desires” (S 345,7).
“Desire is the bosom of the heart. We will possess God if we dilate desire as much as possible”(TEJ 40,10).
“As you cannot see now, let your exercise be desire. All the life of the Christian man is a holy desire” (TCJ 4,6).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on God
“Thanks to You, my sweetness, my hope and my God, thanks to You for Your gifts; but keep them for me. Thus You will also keep me and those that You gave me will be increased and perfected, and I will be with You, because You gave me that I might exist” (C 1,20,31).
“You called and cried out, and broke my deafness; You shone and resplendenced, and healed my blindness; You exhaled Your perfume and I breathed, and I sigh for You; I tasted You, and I feel hunger and thirst; You touched me, and I burned in Your peace” (C 10,27,38).
“God is our possession and we are God’s possession” (CS 36,s.1,4).
“Return, return, prevaricator, to the heart; let not your soul prepare for the fight. More powerful than you is He to whom you declared war. The greater stones you throw at the sky, the greater ruin will fall upon you. Rather enter into your heart; know yourself. God displeases you; be ashamed; displease yourself. You would do nothing good if He were not good and you would not bear with me in anything if He were not just” (CS 70,1,14).
“No one obtains firmness from God, except he who recognizes his weakness in himself” (S 76,6).
“Everything that God works in us, He works knowing what He does; no one is better than Him, no one wiser, no one more powerful” (S 293D,5).
“God is your all: if you are hungry, He is your bread; and if you are thirsty, He is your water; and if you are in darkness, He is your light, which always remains incorruptible; and if you are naked, He will be your garment of immortality, when all that is corruptible is clothed with incorruptibility and what is mortal is clothed with immortality” (TEJ 13,5).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on the Holy Spirit
“This is that Spirit in whom we cry out: «Abba, Father!», and, for the same reason, He makes us ask for whom we desire to receive, He makes us seek whom we desire to find, He makes us call to whom we propose to reach” (CS 118,14,2).
“No one fulfills the law except by the grace of the Holy Spirit” (S 8,17).
“Therefore, if you want to receive the life of the Holy Spirit, preserve charity, love the truth and desire unity to reach eternity” (S 267,4).
“It is no small thing that the Holy Spirit teaches us. He insinuates to us that we are pilgrims and teaches us to sigh for the homeland, and the groans are those same sighs” (TEJ 6,2).
“Therefore, if we are children of God, the Spirit of God guides us and the Spirit of God acts in us” (S 335J,4).
“Just as the body of flesh is simply the flesh, the gift of the Holy Spirit is the same Holy Spirit. It is a gift from God insofar as it is given to those to whom it is given” (T 15,19,36).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on the Eucharist
“I think of my ransom, and I eat and drink it and distribute it, and, poor, I desire to be satiated with it in the company of those who eat it and are satiated” (C 10,43,70)
“Grand is the table in which the delicacies are the same Lord of the table. No one gives himself as food to the guests; this is what Christ the Lord does; he is the one who invites, he the food and the drink” (S 329,1).
“When He gives us His body and His blood, He gives us His humility” (CS 33,s.2,4).
“Christ shows you His table, that is, Himself. Approach that table and be satiated. Be poor, and you will be satiated” (S 332,2).
“I call body and blood of Christ… the fruit formed from the earthly seed consecrated by mystical prayer, being for the one who receives it health of the soul and memorial of the passion of the Lord” (T3,4,10).
“Sacrament made visible by the intervention of men, but sanctified by the invisible action of the Holy Spirit…” (T 3,4,10).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on Happiness
“The happy life is joy of the truth, because this is joy of you, who are the truth” (C 10,23,33).
“Full happiness will only be found in that life where no one will be a servant anymore” (CD 4,33).
“It is already clear how the satisfaction of all desires is happiness, which is not a goddess, but a gift from God” (CD 5, pról.).
“It is not the same to live as to live happily” (C 13,4,5).
“True and secure happiness to the highest degree is attained, above all, by good men who honor God, the only one who can grant it” (CD 2,23,1).
“Better is a temporal happiness, than a miserable eternity” (CD 8,16).
“God is the source of our happiness and the goal of our appetite” (CD 10,3,2).
“Desiring happiness all, many ignore the way to reach it” (CS 118,1,1).
“Deceptive happiness is the greatest misfortune” (CS 129,1).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on Grace
“Then, if God works in you, you work well by the grace of God, not by your strength. Then, if you rejoice, fear also; lest what was given to the humble be taken away from the proud”(CS 65,5).
“This is the Christian doctrine: no one works well if it is not with the grace of Christ. What man works badly is his own; what he works well, he works by the grace of God” (CS 93,15).
“Help me to do what you command and give me what you command” (CS 118,12,5).
“Grace is what makes the saints” (S 145,3).
“Grace preceded your merits. Grace does not proceed from merit, but merit from grace. For if grace proceeds from merit, you bought it, you did not receive it freely” (S 169,3).
“Such is the grace that is freely given, not by merits of the one who works, but by the mercy of the one who grants it” (Ca 140,19.48).
“If grace does not help, we can have neither piety nor justice, neither in our works nor in our will” (Ca 186,1.3).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on Humility
“I, who was not humble, did not have humble Jesus for my God, nor did I know of what thing His weakness could be a teacher” (C 7,18,24).
“Humility raises the heart and pride abases it” (CD 14,13,1).
“Be humble before your God; humble so that you may be sublime with your glorified God. If you are sprinkled with hyssop, the humility of Christ will cleanse you” (CS 50,12).
“The weakness that is given in humility is the greatest strength” (CS 92,6).
“It is in humility where justice is fulfilled”(S 52,1).
“Are you looking for stairs to climb up to Him? Look for the wood of humility and you have already arrived” (S 70A,2).
“Height pleases everyone, but humility is the step to reach it” (S 96,3).
“The humility of man is his confession, and the greatest elevation of God is his mercy” (TEJ 14,5).
“All humility consists in that you know yourself” (TEJ 25,16)
“The simulation of humility is the greatest pride” (SV 43,44).
“Humility is the greatest of Christian teachings, for by humility charity is preserved, and nothing else corrupts it more quickly than pride” (ECG 15).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on the Church
“The Church stands firm with prayer to be purified by confession, and while it lives here, it remains so” (S 181,7).
“The Church, brothers, is also the traveler’s inn, where the wounded are healed during this mortal life; but up there, it has reserved the possession of the inheritance” (TEJ 41,13).
“The fold of Christ is the Catholic Church. Whoever wants to enter the fold, enter through the door, confess the true Christ” (TEJ 45,5).
“Indeed, I would not believe in the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not compel me to do so” (RM 5).
“In the midst of the pagans there are children of the Church, and within the Church there are false Christians” (CD 1,35).
“The house of God is the Church; it still contains evil, but the beauty of the house of God resides in the good; it is found in the saints” (CS 25,2,12).
“In the field of the Lord, that is, the Church, sometimes what was wheat becomes weeds and what was weeds becomes wheat; and no one knows what will be tomorrow” (S 73A,1).
“Let us not withdraw from the Church because we see that there are weeds in it. We must only strive to be wheat ourselves” (Ca 108,3.10).
“No one can have God the Father favorable if he despises the Church mother” (S 255A).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on Interiority
“And, admonished from here to return to myself, I entered into my interior guided by you; and I was able to do it because you made yourself my help. I entered and saw with the eye of my soul, however it was, above the very eye of my soul, above my mind, an immutable light…” (C 7,10,16).
“Let us rise up, returning upon ourselves like the younger son of the Gospel, in order to return to Him, from whom we had departed through sin” (CD 11,28).
“Wherever I go, I follow myself. You, man, can flee wherever you want, but not outside your conscience. Enter your house, rest in your bed, penetrate into the interior; nothing more internal can you find to flee to outside your conscience, if your sins gnaw at you” (CS 30,2,s.1,8).
“I will return to myself; there I will find what I must immolate. I will enter within myself; in myself I will find the immolation of praise; let my conscience be your altar” (CS 49,21).
“Within I will have charity; it will not be on the surface; in the innermost part of the heart will be what I love. Nothing is more interior than our marrow” (CS 65,20).
“You who are more interior to me than my most intimate things; you within, in my heart…” (CS 118,22,6).
“In the interior man Christ dwells, and in the interior man you will be renewed according to the image of God; know in his image his Creator” (TEJ 18,10).
“Do not want to pour yourself out; enter within yourself, because in the interior man resides the truth; and if you find that your nature is changeable, transcend yourself, but do not forget that, when you rise above the peaks of your being, you rise above your soul, endowed with reason. Direct, then, your steps there where the light of reason is kindled…” (VR 39,72).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on Freedom
“The free will of the will is free when it does not submit to vices and sins” (CD 14,11,1).
“Do not abuse, then, freedom to sin freely, but use it not to sin” (TEJ 41,8).
“They conform to freedom insofar as they conform to the truth” (Ca 101,2).
“Freedom is valid for doing good, if God helps it, which is realized in prayer and in humble confession” (Ca 157,2.5).
“True freedom consists in the joy of good works, and it is also pious servitude through obedience to the law” (E 30,9).
“The law of freedom is the law of charity, not that of fear” (NG 57,67).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on Prayer
“Let us groan now, let us pray now; groaning is proper to the unhappy; supplication, to the indigent. Supplication will pass, praise will follow; weeping will pass, joy will follow” (CS 26,2,14).
“Joy is given in song; groaning, in prayer. Groan for present things, sing for future things; pray about what is actual, sing about what you hope for” (CS 29,2,16).
“If man desires to have what God commands him, he must ask God to give him what He commands” (CS 118,4,2).
“These are the two wings of prayer with which one flies to God: to forgive the guilty his offense and to give to the needy” (5 205,3).
“God, our Father, who exhorts us to prayer and grants what is asked of you, for by praying to you we live better and are better: hear me, because I am groping in these darknesses; give me your right hand, help me with your light and deliver me from errors; with your direction enter within me to ascend to you. Amen” (Sí 2,6,9).
“Many times the affection of the one who prays surpasses the defect of the prayer” (TB 6,25,47).
Quotes from Saint Augustine on Unity
“The unity of Christ is very strong; let no one divide it, let no one destroy it” (CS 97,3).
“Whoever abandons unity, violates charity, and whoever violates charity, whatever he has, is nothing” (S 88,21).
“Unity is the form of any beauty” (Ca 18,2).
“Dissensions should never be loved. But sometimes they are born of charity or serve as a test for it” (Ca 210,2).
“Love for unity can cover the multitude of sins” (TB 5,2,2).
“Those who divide unity cannot say that they have charity” (TEJ 7,3).
“Harmony begins with unity and is beautiful thanks to equality and symmetry and is united by order” (Mu 6,17,56).
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