Confessions Quotes
"Yet man, a mere segment of what you made, strives to appraise you—man, 'confined by a nature that must die,' confined by this evidence of his sin, the evidence that you rebuff the overweening, yet man would still appraise you, this mere segment of what you made."
"You prompt us yourself to find satisfaction in appraising you, since you made us tilted toward you, and our heart is unstable until stabilized in you."
"What other Lord is Lord, what other God but God?"—highest, best, most powerful, all-powerfulest, most merciful yet most just, hidden far away yet very near, most beautiful yet most strong, most fixed yet most elusive."
"I was not the son of your servingwoman, but your son, O Lord. I was spread out in my darkness and you were my light."
"I had plenty of pears that were better, and these I stole only to be stealing, since I threw them away once they were stolen. I dined on the crime itself, which is what I wanted to savor."
"You had not in fact left me, but showed a pitying severity. You dashed with bitter repinings my forbidden joys, making me seek joys with no repining, which I would never find apart from you, Lord."
"I sought not with the mind's reason, by which you singled me out from the beasts, but with the body's senses."
"Truth, Truth—how the inmost fibers of my soul pined for you, as you were invoked in frequent and multiple ways, by their oral instruction or their many extensive writings."
"Admittedly it was a low and skulking one, and I was in woeful condition to entertain it. But what, precisely, was it? ‘Who can understand what is wanting?’"
"But those false theories I believed, alas. I went, alas, step by step down toward hell’s region, thrashing about and seething without truth, seeking you."
"I was still willing, by my standards, to bank on those mountebanks called astrologers, since they sacrificed no animals and did not ask demons to tell the future."
"If a thing could not show me him as he was, it was hateful and repulsive—better my groans and tears, which alone gave me semi-relief."
"The more I loved my friend, the more I hated and feared as the most obscene enemy of all the death that had taken him from me."
"The soul had nothing to answer. And if I urged it to ‘have hope in the Lord,’ it remained inert—rightly, since the man it had lost was more real and cherished than that wraith it was asked to rely on."
"I was content to abide for a while where I had chanced to find myself, until something better appeared."
"No wonder then that there is grief for the friend who dies—a darkness of sorrow over all, the heart melting to tears as the sweet becomes bitter."
"She saw at once the real point, which had not occurred to me before she spoke."
"I would not let animals be sacrificed to demands for my sake, yet I was sacrificing myself to that heresy."
"His comment, which you prompted in her while she was awake, affected me much more than did the dream itself."
"Her prayers were steadily making their way to you, while you left me for the time to toss and re-toss in the dark."
"I grappled my soul to me, lacerated and bleeding as it was, resistant to my grappling."
"I hugged my sad life closer to me than I did my friend, not wanting to be sad, but preferring life, even with sadness, to him."
"How sweet flowers are plucked from bitterness when we wail and weep, sigh and plain?"
"The detachment would be structured thus: we would pool all our belongings, creating a single household fund, so that in open fellowship no one would own this or that, but from the contributions of each there would be common property, the whole of it for each, and all of it shared by all of us."
"Many are the thoughts in our hearts, but your design persists through eternity."
"‘with sustenance arriving in time’ as you ‘open your hand to fill our souls with your blessings.’"
"‘to snatch me from the slime’ and rinse me clean, though I did not suspect it."
"If we could live forever, I asked, without interruption of sensual pleasures, and without even the fear of losing them, is that not all a man could ask in the way of happiness?"
"Sad the lot of one rash enough to expect to find something better when he turns away from you."
"But hardly had I brushed them away when, ‘in the blink of an eye,’ they were back, the whole crowd of them, assailing my vision, clouding it over."
"‘My heart cried out in protest’ against all my former materialist conceptions."
"You struck off my chains, a praise-offering I will sacrifice to you."
"‘I was deep in conversation, putting before you my straits, in your sight,’ and you sent me a man."
"You had so turned me to you that you freed me from seeking a wife or any other prospect in this world."
"‘You changed her grieving into joy,’ far beyond her intentions—with a chaster, sweeter joy than she had looked for."
"‘I will bear you up,’ lead you home, and support you there."
"Will not God have my allegiance, from whom my rescue comes, my God, the rescuer who sustains me, who holds me steady always?"
"I am not yet filled with you, since you draw up what you fill while I weigh myself down with delights I should regret and regrets that should delight me, confused about which will prevail."
"You were with me all the while I was not with you, kept from you by things that could not be except by being in you."
"The very sky and earth, after all, bid me love you, as do all the things (all around me) they contain."
"All desire to take joy in the truth. I have met many who enjoy lying to others, but none who enjoy being lied to themselves."
"You unmistakably demand that I check ‘the flesh’s urges, the eyes’ urges [to know], and worldly designs.’"
"I know that Noah was allowed to eat of any food at hand, that Elijah was strengthened by meat."
"Let the ears of ‘that temple which is your people’ be brotherly and devout to me as I end this account of my testing by the flesh’s urges."
"All those lights are one Light, and ‘one are all those’ who look on it with love."
"Let me be in that choir of singers, resisting the eyes’ enticements lest my feet be enmeshed as I tread your path."
"You continually disentangle my feet, no matter how often I am thrashing in the snares laid about me."
"How many snares for the eye men contrive by ingenuity and art."
"Toward that source my soul aspires night and day."
"Yet even I, proclaiming and accepting these things, become at times enmeshed in beauties that I see."
"Beyond the cravings of the flesh, the soul takes in through those senses an empty and transgressive urge."
"It is for this perverse craving that unnatural things are put on in the theater."
"In this vast forest, full of snares and perils, see how much I may have cleared and cleansed my heart."
"Who, indeed, can list all the minute and unnoticed ways by which this transgressive urge tests us daily?"
"I no longer go to the arena to see a hound course a hare."
"I can, indeed, admire in them your marvelous way of ordering even slightest things."
"For a start, you cured me from my drive toward self-justification."
"Pitiable, is it not, this filth of self-promotion?"
"I have performed an examination of the symptoms left in me by sin."
"Ground down by my sins and by the weight of my sorrow, I troubled my heart."
"I do it, not as informing you, but as stirring up my own reaction to you."
"Heaven and earth proclaim that they were created."
"What is time? Who can give that a brief or easy answer?"
"What but some familiar phrase can bring this home to our sluggish intellects?"
"My mind has burned to understand this knotty problem."
"So time is measured, my mind, in you."
"I have learned to deal with any situation I meet. I have experienced shortages and surpluses. I have been tempered by any and every turn—to eat well or go hungry, to have plenty or have nothing, since I can do anything so long as Christ is my strength."
"The fruit is the giver’s proper motive in doing good."
"The joy that truly fed him he described with truth: ‘I rejoice exuberantly in the Lord that the concern you once felt for me, of which you grew tired, has momentarily blossomed again.’"
"The soul lives by fleeing what it would die by pursuing."
"You saw the entirety of your creation, Lord, that it was ‘eminently good.’ And we see it now as ‘eminently good.’"
"Your works praise you, prompting us to love you, and we love you, prompting us to praise."
"Each particular is good, but the entirety is ‘eminently good’ in your Word, your only Son."
"All these things we see as good, ‘eminently’ so, because you see them in us, you who sent the Spirit by which we see them, that we may love you in them."