Brian Eshleman's Reviews > Confessions

“The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“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.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“The Bible was composed in such a way that as beginners mature, its meaning grows with them.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“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.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“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.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“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.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“You are my Lord, because You have no need of my goodness.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“There is no health in those who are displeased by an element in Your creation, just as there was none in me when I was displeased by many things You had made. Because my soul didn't dare to say that my God displeased me, it refused to attribute to You whatever was displeasing.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“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.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“You never go away from us, yet we have difficulty in returning to You. Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back. Kindle and seize us. Be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love. Let us run.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo (Give me chastity and continence, but not just yet)!”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance. The mind commands the hand to move, and it so easy that one hardly distinguishes the order from its execution. Yet mind is mind and hand is body. The mind orders the mind to will. The recipient of the order is itself, yet it does not perform it.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“The soul is "torn apart in a painful condition as long as it prefers the eternal because of its Truth but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Every day my conscience makes confession relying on the hope of Your mercy as more to be trusted than its own innocence.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Do they desire to join me in thanksgiving when they hear how, by your gift, I have come close to you, and do they pray for me when they hear how I am held back by my own weight? ...A brotherly mind will love in me what you teach to be lovable, and will regret in me what you teach to be regrettable. This is a mark of a Christian brother's mind, not an outsider's--not that of 'the sons of aliens whose mouth speaks vanity, and their right hand is a right hand of iniquity' (Ps. 143:7 f.). A brotherly person rejoices on my account when he approves me, but when he disapproves, he is loving me. To such people I will reveal myself. They will take heart from my good traits, and sigh with sadness at my bad ones. My good points are instilled by you and are your gifts. My bad points are my faults and your judgements on them. Let them take heart from the one and regret the other. Let both praise and tears ascend in your sight from brotherly hearts, your censers. ...But you Lord...Make perfect my imperfections”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“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.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“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.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Often the contempt of vainglory becomes a source of even more vainglory, for it is not being scorned when the contempt is something one is proud of.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Such is the strength of the burden of habit. Here I have the power to be but do not wish it. There I wish to be but lacks the power. On both grounds, I'm in misery.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Why, then, do I set before You an ordered account of so many things? it's certainly not through me that You know them. But I'm stirring up love for You in myself and in those who read this so that we may all say, great is the Lord and highly worthy to be praised. I tell my story for love of Your love.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Ignorance and stupidity are given the names of simplicity and innocence...Idleness appears as desire for a quiet life.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine

“What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Idling of our elders is called business; the idling of boys, though quite like it, is punished by those same elders, and no one pities either the boys or the men.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“Though I was retreating from the Truth, I appeared to myself to be going toward it because I did not yet know that evil with nothing but the privation of good.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“A sense of Deity is inscribed on every heart. Nay, even idolatry is ample evidence of this fact.”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“That vague and wandering opinion of Deity is declared by an apostle to be ignorance of God:”
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions