Love and Saint Augustine Quotes

“Fearlessness is what love seeks… Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“It is because we know happiness that we want to be happy, and since nothing is more certain than our wanting to be happy (beatum esse velle), our notion of happiness guides us in determining the respective goods that then became objects of our desires.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Quaestio Mihi Factus Sum” (“I am become a question to myself”)”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“It is memory and not expectation (for instance, the expectation of death as in Heidegger’s approach) that gives unity and wholeness to human existence.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“we saw that what makes love, defined as desire, unbearable is the constant fear—that must accompany love—of losing its object.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“For we [B:033139] call ‘world’ not only this fabric which God made, heaven and earth . . . but the inhabitants of the world are also called ‘the world.’ . . . Especially all lovers of the world are called the world.”35”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Who will hold [the heart], and fix it so that it may stand still for a little while and catch for a moment the splendor of eternity which stands still forever, and compare this with temporal moments that never stand still, and see that it is incomparable . . . but that all this while in the eternal, nothing passes but the whole is present.31”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“To sum up: Man initiates the quest for his own being—by asserting “I have become a question to myself.”46 This quest for his own being arises from his being created and endowed with a memory that tells him that he did not make himself. Hence, the quest for his Being is actually the quest for his origin—for the Creator of the creature. In this quest, which takes place in memory, the past comes back into the present and the yearning for a return to the past origin turns into the anticipating desire of a future that will make the origin available again.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Happiness occurs when the gap between lover and beloved has been closed, and the question is whether cupiditas, the love of this world, can ever attain it.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Augustine’s caritas is the basis for founding new communities on common moral judgment as well as the existential, determining “fact” of shared history.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Indeed, this relationship is no more identical than beauty, the quintessence of all beautiful bodies, can be said to be identical to any one body. And just as body may be consumed but not beauty, light may be extinguished but not brightness, the sounds come and go but not the very sweetness of music, the dark “abysses” of the human heart are subject to time and consumed by time, but not its quintessential being that adheres to it. To this quintessential being I can belong by virtue of love, since love confers belonging . . . . In finding God [man] finds what he lacks, the very thing he is not: an eternal essence. And this eternal manifests itself “inwardly”—it is the internum aeternum, the internal insofar as it is eternal.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“What will be at stake here is the Will as the spring of action, that is, as the power of spontaneously beginning . . . . No doubt every man, by virtue of his birth, is a new beginning, and his power of beginning may well correspond to this fact of the human condition. It is in line with these Augustinian reflections that the will has sometimes, and not only with Augustine, been considered to be the actualization of the principium individuationis.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Augustine’s pietistic, confessional stream of discourse also broke with the tradition of Western thought by reconfiguring the idea of the soul, not only as rational “essence” but also as “the mysterious and unknown realms of [the] inner world that were no less hidden . . . than the distant realms of the outer world”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Through remembrance man discovers this twofold “before” of human existence . . . . This is the reason why the return to one’s origin (redire ad creatorem) can at the same time be understood as an anticipating reference to one’s end.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“In the society founded on Adam man has made himself independent of the Creator. He depends on other persons and not on God. The human race as such originates in Adam and not in the Creator. It has come to be by generation and relates to its source only through all its generations. Based on kinship, the human community is thereby a society from and with the dead; in other words this community is historical.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“In loving God, which is the new turn to him, the law has ceased to be demanding and fearsome. [A:033331] the world has become a desert, and covetousness has lost its meaning. This loving acceptance reconciles the creature with its Creator. Man has returned to God from the world; he has denied the world as well as himself, insofar as he is of the world. In this self-denial man achieves the real truth and meaning of his createdness.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Thus the course of life is nothing but a race toward death, a race in which no one may stand still or slow down even for a moment, but all must run with equal speed and never-changing stride. For to the short-lived as to the long-lived, each day passes with unchanging pace. . . . On the way to death the man who takes more time travels no more slowly, even though he covers much more ground.113 The interchangeability of life’s beginning and end lets life itself appear to be no more than a mere distance stripped of any qualitative significance. Existence itself loses its autonomous meaning, which can only be extension in time. Once we assume the perspective that we no longer view life as “before death” but as “after death,” death equalizes by devaluing life as such.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“The question about man’s own being, in which the specific being in life assumes such decisive importance even if it is seen as a nullity, becomes a moot question. The concrete course of life is no longer important. If death only brings us a new being (which in fact is our original being), existence has been leveled out, and it does not matter whether human life is long or short.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Death shows man that he is nothing if man does not understand himself as a part of the whole. By showing man his nothingness, however, death also points out both his source and a possible escape from nothingness—from death.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Death removes us from both the humanly constituted world and the divine fabric. Since man is transitory, he loses both the world into which he is created as well as the world he created for himself by his love of the world.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“What “happens by our will” turns heaven and earth into the world in this second sense.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Therefore, nothing happens in the world by chance. This having been established, it seems to follow that whatever is done in the world is done partly by divine agency and partly by our will.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Nonetheless, Plotinus’s notion of evil, that one should “not think it to be anything but . . . a lesser good and a continuous diminution,”76 echoes through most of Augustine’s discussions of this question. In a similar way, the general concept of Being as “the order of the whole” (Plotinus’ taxis tou holou) and of men as parts of this Being is decisive for Augustine’s concept of “the well-ordered man” (homo ordinatissimus), whom Augustine distinguishes from the evil man as a “part” that has become wicked because it did “not agree with its whole.”77”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“For are not all things created by God? How could God have created evil? [God] made all natures, not only those which persevered in virtue and justice, but also those that were to sin; and the latter [He made] not that they should sin, but that they might decorate the universe whether they wished to sin or not to sin.58”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“In brief, imitation belongs first among the basic structures that rule human conduct, so that even seeming desertions must be understood as mere perversions. Second, imitation can be actualized explicitly through love: “They loved by believing; they imitated by loving.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“the concept of happiness is present in us through a consciousness that is equated with memory (that is, since happiness is not an “innate” but a remembered idea), this “outside the human condition” actually means before human existence.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Augustine arrives at “the camps and vast palaces of memory.”11 There he finds the notion of the “happy life,” which is his origin and as such the quintessence of his being. The absolute future turns out to be the ultimate past and the way to reach it is through remembrance.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“Desire is truly directed toward a transcendent, transmundane future because it rests ultimately on the desire for an everlasting happy life.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine

“The triumph of memory is that in presenting the past and thus depriving it, in a sense, of its bygone quality, memory transforms the past into a future possibility. What has been can be again—this is what our memory [B:033184] tells us in hope or in fear.”
― Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine