Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

Latin-speaking Philosopher and Theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province whose writings were very influential in the development of Western Christianity

"God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering."

"God has promised forgiveness to your repentance; but He has not promised to-morrow to your procrastination."

"God is best known in not knowing him."

"God is more truly imagined than expressed, and He exists more truly than He is imagined."

"God is one, and the Church is a unity; only unity can respond to him who is one. But there are some people why say, “Yes, that certainly was the case. The Church spread among all nations did respond to him, bearing more children than did the wedded wife. It responded to him in the way of his strength, for it believed that Christ had risen. All nations believed in him. But that Church which was drawn from all nations no longer exists: it has perished.”"

"God is to be worshiped by faith, hope and love."

"God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist."

"God loves each of us as if there were only one of us."

"God provides the wind, but man must raise the sails."

"God will not suffer man to have a knowledge of things to come; for if he had prescience of his prosperity, he would be careless; and if understanding of his adversity, he would be despairing and senseless."

"God writes straight with crooked lines."

"Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet."

"Grant what thou commandest and then command what thou wilt."

"Great art Thou, O Lord, and highly to be praised; great is Thy power, yea, and Thy wisdom is infinite. And man would praise Thee, because he is one of Thy creatures; yea, man, though he bears about with him his mortality, the proof of his sin, the proof that Thou, O God, dost resist the proud, yet would man praise Thee, because he is one of Thy creatures. Thou dost prompt us thereto, making it a joy to praise Thee; for Thou hast created us unto Thyself, and our heart finds no rest until it rests in Thee. Grant me, O Lord, to know and understand which comes first, to call upon Thee, or to praise Thee, and which comes first, to know Thee or to call upon Thee."

"Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity."

"Happiness consists in the attainment of our desires, and in our having only right desires."

"Happy is he who has all that he desires, provided that he desire nothing amiss."

"He cannot have God for his Father who will not have the Church for his mother."

"He fashioned hell for the inquisitive."

"He is truly happy who has all that he wishes to have, and wishes to have nothing which he ought not to wish."

"He that is jealous is not in love."

"He that is kind is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king."

"He that is not jealous is not in love."

"He was not utterly unskilled in handling his own lack of training, and he refused to be rashly drawn into a controversy about those matters from which there would be no exit nor easy way of retreat. This was an additional ground for my pleasure. For the controlled modesty of a mind that admits limitations is more beautiful than the things I was anxious to know about."

"He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent."

"He who created you without you will not justify you without you."

"He who is envious can love no one, and so there can be no worse vice than envy."

"He who is filled with love is filled with God himself."

"He who labours, prays."

"He who sings prays twice."

"Hear the other side."

"Hell was made for the inquisitive."

"Hence, a devout Christian must avoid astrologers and all impious soothsayers, especially when they tell the truth, for fear of leading his soul into error by consorting with demons and entangling himself with the bonds of such association."

"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 the way they are."

"How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity."

"How high a price we pay for the burden of habit! I am fitted for life here where I do not want to be, I want to live there but am unfit for it, and on both counts I am miserable."

"Humble wedlock is far better than proud virginity."

"Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance."

"I asked the whole frame of the world about my God; and he answered, 'I am not He, but He made me'."

"I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake."

"I define charity as a motion of the soul whose purpose is to enjoy God for His own sake and one’s self and one’s neighbor for the sake of god. Lust, on the other hand is a motion of the soul bent upon enjoying one’s self, one’s neighbor, and any creature without reference to God."

"I found thee not, O Lord, without, because I erred in seeking thee without that wert within."

"I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and so new!"

"I heard Your voice from on high. I am the food of the fully grown. Grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change Me into you, like the food of flesh eats. But you will be changed into Me."

"I held my heart back from positively accepting anything, since I was afraid of another fall, and in this condition of suspense I was being all the more killed."

"I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn't find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance – You oh God – towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matter."

"I look forward, not to what lies ahead of me in this life and will surely pass away, but to my eternal goal. I am intent upon this one purpose, not distracted by other aims, and with this goal in view I press on, eager for the prize, God's heavenly summons. Then I shall listen to the sound of Your praises and gaze at Your beauty ever present, never future, never past. But now my years are but sighs. You, O Lord, are my only solace. You, my Father, are eternal. But I am divided between time gone by and time to come, and its course is a mystery to me. My thoughts, the intimate life of my soul, are torn this way and that in the havoc of change. And so it will be until I am purified and melted by the fire of Your love and fused into one with You."

"I probably felt more resentment for what I personally was to suffer than for the wrong they were doing to anyone and everyone. But at that time I was determined not to put up with badly behaved people more out of my own interest than because I wanted them to become good people."

"I recall how miserable I was, and how one day you brought me to a realization of my miserable state. I was preparing to deliver a eulogy upon the emperor in which I would tell plenty of lies with the object of winning favor with the well-informed by my lying; so my heart was panting with anxiety and seething with feverish, corruptive thoughts. As I passed through a certain district in Milan I noticed a poor beggar, drunk, as I believe, and making merry. I groaned and pointed out to the friends who were with me how many hardships our idiotic enterprises entailed. Goaded by greed, I was dragging my load of unhappiness along, and feeling it all the heavier for being dragged. Yet while all our efforts were directed solely to the attainment of unclouded joy, it appeared that this beggar had already beaten us to the goal, a goal which we would perhaps never reach ourselves. With the help of the few paltry coins he had collected by begging this man was enjoying the temporal happiness for which I strove by so bitter, devious and roundabout a contrivance. His joy was no true joy, to be sure, but what I was seeking in my ambition was a joy far more unreal; and he was undeniably happy while I was full of foreboding; he was carefree, I apprehensive. If anyone had questioned me as to whether I would rather be exhilarated or afraid, I would of course have replied, Exhilarated; but if the questioner had pressed me further, asking whether I preferred to be like the beggar, or to be as I was then, I would have chosen to be myself, laden with anxieties and fears. Surely that would have been no right choice, but a perverse one? I could not have preferred my condition to his on the grounds that I was better educated, because that fact was not for me a source of joy but only the means by which I sought to curry favor with human beings: I was not aiming to teach them but only to win their favor."

"I too have sworn heedlessly and all the time, I have had this most repulsive and death-dealing habit. I’m telling your graces; from the moment I began to serve God, and saw what evil there is in forswearing oneself, I grew very afraid indeed, and out of fear I applied the brakes to this old, old, habit."