Yet we must say something when those who say the most are saying nothing.
My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it. It contains much that you will not be pleased to see: this I know and do not...
Greed is not a defect in the gold that is desired but in the man who loves it perversely by falling from justice which he ought to esteem as incomparably superior to gold; nor is lust a defect in bodi...
For the human race is, more than any other species, at once social by nature and quarrelsome by perversion.
For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.
Clearly, it is a happier lot to be the slave of a man than of a lust:
But it must not be supposed that folly is as powerful as truth, just because it can, if it likes, shout louder and longer than truth.
You have been professing yourself reluctant to throw off your load of illusion because truth was uncertain. Well, it is certain now, yet the burden still weighs you down, while other people are given...
What is going on in our minds, then, that we should be more highly delighted at finding cherished objects, or having them restored to us, than if we had always kept them safe?
What could be more hapless than a man controlled by his own creations? It is surely easier for a man to cease to be a man by worshiping man-made gods than for idols to become divine by being adored.
We made bad use of immortality, and so ended up dying; Christ made good use of mortality, so that we might end up living.
The bodies of irrational animals are bent toward the ground, whereas man was made to walk erect with his eyes on heaven, as though to remind him to keep his thoughts on things above.
Someone who knows enough to become the owner of a tree, and gives thanks to you for the benefits it brings him, is in a better state, even if ignorant of its height in feet and the extent of its sprea...
So anyone who thinks that he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbor, has not yet succeeded in understan...
Let the Lord your God be your hope – seek for nothing else from him, but let him himself be your hope. There are people who hope from him riches or perishable and transitory honours, in short they hop...
It is this Good which we are commanded to love with our whole heart, with our whole mind, and with all our strength. It is toward this Good that we should be led by those who love us, and toward this...
I fell away from you, my God, and I went astray, too far astray from you, the support of my youth, and I became to myself a land of want.
For what is the self-complacent man but a slave to his own self-praise.
Do not abandon what You have begun in me, but go on to perfect all that remains unfinished.
No man can be a good bishop if he loves his title but not his task.