858 Quotes by Saint Augustine

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

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.

A young man had become possessed by a devil. The thing within him burst into loud lamentation and departed from the man. At once the youth’s eye fell out on his cheek, and the whole of the pupil which had been black became white.

Don’t hold yourselves cheap, seeing that the creator of all things and of you estimates your value so high, so dear, that he pours out for you every day the most precious blood of his only-begotten Son.

God bids you not to commit lechery, that is, not to have sex with any woman except your wife. You ask of her that she should not have sex with anyone except you – yet you are not willing to observe the same restraint in return.

All the dancer’s gestures are signs of things, and the dance called rational, because it aptly signifies and displays something over and above the pleasure of the senses.

Singing is a lover’s thing.

Don’t you believe that there is in man a deep so profound as to be hidden even to him in whom it is?

Can any praise be worthy of the Lord’s majesty?