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Quote by Augustine

“For such is the depth of the Christian Scriptures that, even if I were attempting to study them and nothing else, from boyhood to decrepit old age, with the utmost leisure, the most unwearied zeal, and with talents greater than I possess, I would still be making progress in discovering their treasures.”

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Augustine

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“What is time? Who can explain this easily and briefly? Who can comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words? Yet what do we speak of, in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time? We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know. But I confidently affirm myself to know that if nothing passes away, there is no past time, and if nothing arrives, there is no future time, and if nothing existed there would be no present time. Take the two tenses, past and future. How can they 'be' when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if the present were always present, it would not pass into the past: it would not be time but eternity. If then, in order to be time at all, the present is so made that it passes into the past, how can we say that this present also 'is'? The cause of its being is that it will cease to be. So indeed we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends toward non-existence.”

PhilosophyPastTimeFuturePresentMetaphysicsBeingOntologyAugustine
Book:Confessions
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“...we have chosen to speak of spirituality ultimately as the way in which we live out our response to God. Unless we find this personal, transformational meaning in its fullest sense, the struggle for wholeness will remain unresolved. As Augustine put it in the first paragraph of his Confessions, 'God created us for a relationship with him and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in God.”

HealingSpiritual DisciplinesSpiritual DirectionAugustine
Book:The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith
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“Sometimes plausibility is pegged to a person. The turning point for Augustine was not an argument; it was Ambrose. What Ambrose said, what he taught and preached, was not insignificant. But what made a dent on Augustine's imagination was Ambrose's very being--what he represented in his way of life. Ambrose was a living icon of someone who integrated assiduous learning with ardent Christian faith. If to that point, based on his childhood experience, Augustine had concluded that Christians were simple, backward, and naive, the encounter with Ambrose was the destabilising experience of meeting someone with intellectual firepower who was also following Jesus. Even more than that, it was Ambrose's hospitality that prompted Augustine to reconsider the faith he'd rejected as unenlightened. What ultimately shifted Augustine's plausibility structures? Love.”

FaithChristian LivingHospitalityAugustineJames Ka Smith
Book:On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts
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“In the second book of his great autobiographical word, Confessions, Augustine fretted at length over a childish act of vandalism that he committed long ago with some teenage friends; he was now struggling to understand the motive behind an action that seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever. He concluded that he broke the law for no other reason than the thrill of breaking it, experiencing a rush he calls a 'deceptive sense of omnipotence.' By this phrase he meant that such gratuitous lawbreaking provides the illusion of being as free from the restraints of the moral law as is God, who must be imagined as both creating the moral law and existing outside it. But Augustine went on to say that this attempt to be a god is really only a 'perverse and vicious imitation' of the real deity, not only because it’s so obviously an illusion but also because the very attempt to be like God tacitly concedes that God is a superior model to be imitated.”

GodlikeAugustineHunger GamesVandalismHunger Games Philosophy
Author:Brian McDonald
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