A playboy turned theologian, Augustine of Hippo provided direction for the church in the midst of a crumbling world (fall of the Roman empire). He teaches us quite a bit about the overcoming power of grace and salvation God provides. He’s also an important figure for printers, craft brewers, and people who have sore eyes. May your eyes and mind be inspired…

• God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.
• Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.
• What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.
• But my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in Him but in myself and His other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.
• What grace is meant to do is to help good people, not to escape their sufferings, but to bear them with a stout heart, with a fortitude that finds its strength in faith.
• Patience is the companion of wisdom.
• The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.
• To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek Him the greatest adventure; to find Him, the greatest human achievement.
• We make ourselves a ladder out of our vices if we trample the vices themselves underfoot.
• Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.
• Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.
• Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.