“My heart which was deeply attached was cut and wounded, and left a trail of blood.”

“Nothing kept me from an even deeper whirlpool of erotic indulgence except fear of death and of your coming judgment which, through the various opinions I had held, never left my breast. With my friends Alypius and Nebridius I discussed the ultimate nature of good and evil. To my mind, Epicurus would have been awarded the palm of victory, had I not believed that after death, the life of the soul remains with the consequences of our acts, a belief which Epicurus rejected; and I asked: if we were immortal and lived in unending bodily pleasure, with no fear of losing it, why should we not be happy? What else should we be seeking for?”

“As a runaway horse is better than a stone which does not run away because it lacks self-movement and sense perception, so the creature is more excellent which sins by free will than that which does not sin only because it has no free will.”

“Let those philosophers disappear, who attribute natural corporeal principles to the intelligence attached to matter, such as Thales, who refers everything to water, Anaximenes to air, the Stoics to fire, Epicurus to atoms, that is to say, to infinitely small objects that can neither be divided nor perceived. Let us reserve the same fate to all the other philosophers, who are too numerous to name and who claimed to have found in simple and combined substances, lifeless or living, indeed in what we call material bodies, the cause and principle of things.”

“Some of them believed that inanimate beings could produce living beings. Such was the case of the Epicureans; these philosophers, and others like them, were incapable of imagining anything but what their heart, corrupted by their senses, allowed them to see.”

“Many years of my life had passed by—about twelve—since in my nineteenth year I had read Cicero’s Hortensius, and had been stirred to a zeal for wisdom.”

“I am quite certain that I am, that I know I am, and that I love this being and this knowing. Where these truths are concerned I need not quail before the academicians [skeptics] when they say: ‘what if you should be mistaken?’ Well, if I am mistaken, I exist. For a man who does not exist can surely not be mistaken either, and if I am mistaken, therefore I exist.”

— Augustine (426), City of God [7]

“That which is called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist, from the beginning of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion which already existed began to be called Christianity.”

— Augustine (c.400) (Ѻ)

“The good Christian should be beware of mathematicians, and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell.”

— Augustine (c.400), The Literal Meaning of Genesis (source: mAtheist); compare: Hamid Al-Ghazali (c.1100) (Ѻ) [5]