Saint Augustine Quotes

Lord, teach me to know you, and to know myself.

Lord, who art always the same, give that I know myself, give that I know Thee.

It seems to me that we are profoundly ignorant of ourselves.

If you have a trust in and an expectation of your own solitude, everything that you need to know will be revealed to you.

Now, Friends, deal plainly with yourselves, and let the eternal Light search you, and try you, for the good of your souls. For this will deal plainly with you. It will rip you up, and lay you open, and make all manifest which lodges in you; the secret subtlety of the enemy of your souls, this eternal searcher and trier will make manifest. Therefore all to this come, and by this be searched, and judged, and led and guided. For to this you must stand or fall.

The shadow is the greatest teacher for how to come to the light.

We are known in a depth of darkness through which we ourselves do not even dare to look. And at the same time, we are seen in a height of a fullness which surpasses our highest vision.

Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

We shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavoring to know God; for, beholding His greatness we realize our own littleness; His purity shows us our foulness; and by meditating upon His humility we find how very far we are from being humble.

Ignorance of God and of ourselves is the great principle and cause of all our disquietments; and, this ariseth mostly not from want of light and instruction, but for want of consideration and application.

Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

He who knows himself is enlightened.

We seek for truth in ourselves; in our neighbours, and in its essential nature. We find it first in ourselves by severe self scrutiny, then in our neighbours by compassionate indulgence, and, finally, in its essential nature by that direct vision which belongs to the pure in heart.

Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.

Wisdom is that apprehension of heavenly things to which the spirit rises through love.

God, Nature, the wise, the world, preach man, exhort him both by word and deed to the study of himself.

Spirituality is not about looking up or down - it's about looking inward.

I found that there were things that God could reveal to me that I could never get myself physically.

Meditation isn't to disappear into the light. Meditation is to see all of what we are.

In failing to confess, Lord, I would only hide You from myself, not myself from You.

We say that knowledge is not mere talk, but a certain divine knowledge, that light which is kindled in the soul as a result of obedience to the commandments, and which reveals all that is in a state of becoming, enables man to know himself and teaches him to become possessed of God.

The knowledge of self is the most important thing, because how are you going to know God if you don't know yourself? How are you going to know anything if you don't know yourself?

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the Shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.

Without going out of my door, I can know all things on earth. Without looking out of my window I could know the ways of heaven. The farther one travels, The less one knows, the less one really knows.