Augustine of Hippo 354 – 430
Augustine of Hippo was a Roman-African theologian and philosopher whose work shaped Western Christianity and Latin philosophy for the next millennium. His Confessions, addressed to God in autobiographical form, inaugurated a major literary genre and remains a foundational text on memory, time, and the structure of the self. The City of God presented an account of Christian providence in human history, written in response to the sack of Rome in 410. He synthesized Neoplatonic philosophy with Christian doctrine, producing influential treatments of free will, grace, original sin, and the just war. Augustine served as Bishop of Hippo Regius in Roman North Africa from 396 until his death in 430.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Roman
- Era
- Medieval
- Movements
- Medieval, Christian, Platonism
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Augustine of Hippo:
“Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
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Attributed to Augustine of Hippo:
“Love, and do what you will.”
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Attributed to Augustine of Hippo:
“Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”
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Attributed to Augustine of Hippo:
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.”
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Attributed to Augustine of Hippo:
“Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
Quotes that are not actually from Augustine of Hippo
These lines are widely circulated as Augustine of Hippo, but they do not appear in Augustine of Hippo's works. Each entry below identifies the actual source.
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“Pray as if everything depended on God; work as if everything depended on you.”
This maxim is variously credited to Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, and several other figures, but it does not appear in Augustine's surviving works. The form most commonly quoted today is associated with later Catholic devotional literature and circulated widely from the 19th century onward. Its earliest precise wording cannot be reliably traced to any single classical or medieval source.