Tag: Saint Augustine

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Yet who can tell how many times each day our curiosity is tempted  by the most trivial and insignificant matters? Who can tell how often  we give way?   –Saint Augustine,  Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin,…

Psalmophilia

How I cried out to you, my God, when I read the Psalms of David,  those hymns of faith, those songs of a pious heart in which the spirit  of pride can find no place!…

Every Grain of Sand

Every particle of sand in the glass of time is  precious to me, even if I were able to set my facts in order and give an  account of them.  –Saint Augustine, Confessions, 253-4, translated by…

Today’s One-Liner (#334)

[Augustine] is led from confession  of sin to confession of faith and finally to confession of God’s glory.  –R. S. Pine-Coffin, translator in Saint Augustine, Confessions. 16

Never Out-of-Date

Cicero lived some five hundred years before Augustine. He himself sent his own son to Greece to study philosophy. Cicero wrote to his son a famous letter, the famous On Duties, which attempted to explain…

Today’s One-Liner (#297)

I take it for granted that we read what are rightly called “great books”—Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, the Greek tragedians, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, the Bible, St. Augustine, some Church fathers, St. Thomas, Shakespeare, and into the…

Readiness Is All

Every time I re-read a book of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, or Aquinas, I shake my head and wonder why I had not seen that before. The answer is most likely that I was not ready…

Today’s One-Liner (#272)

 Yet who can tell how many times each day our curiosity is tempted  by the most trivial and insignificant matters? –Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin

For the Young

 St. Augustine’s famous Confessions is a book directed to the very heart of each young person. No other book is quite like it. In it, Augustine excitedly tells us about his reading of Cicero’s now…