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Quote by Augustine of Hippo

“If physical objects please you, praise God for them, but turn back your love to their Creator, lest, in those things which please you, you displease Him. If souls please you, let them be loved in God; for in themselves they are mutable, but in Him firmly established — without Him they would simply cease to exist. Book 4: Chapter 12”

Quote by Augustine of Hippo

Book:Confessions
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Confessions

This work is a personal narrative by a renowned thinker, exploring his life, thoughts, and beliefs in a profound and introspective manner. more

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Augustine of Hippo

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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“When Saint Augustine was formulating his doctrine of Original Sin, all he had to do was look at people as they are originally. Originally, they’re children. Saint Augustine may have had a previous job – unmentioned in his Confessions – as a preschool day-care provider. But it’s wrong to use infantile as a pejorative. It’s the other way around. What children display is adultishness. Children are, for example, perfectly adultish in their self-absorption. Tiny tots look so wise, staring at their stuffed animals. You wonder what they’re thinking. Then they learn to talk. What they’re thinking is, My Beanie Baby!”

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Author:P.J. O'Rourke
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