“Too late did I love Thee, O Fairness, so ancient, and yet so new! Too late did I love…”
Too late did I love Thee, O Fairness, so ancient, and yet so new! Too late did I love Thee! For behold, Thou wert within, and I without, and there did I seek Thee; I, unlovely, rushed heedlessly among the things of beauty Thou madest. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee.
Augustine of Hippo · Confessions · NPNF1 I, Confessions, Book X, chapter xxvii, 38
The most quoted passage in the Confessions after the first paragraph, and a lament rather than a boast: the beauty he had been chasing through created things had been inside him the whole time.
How this is known
These words were matched, word for word, against this project’s own copy of the volume cited.
The project holds the volume this row cites, NPNF series 1 vol. 1, and the build matches these words against its bytes at every rebuild. It is Pilkington’s rendering; the same passage is rendered differently elsewhere in the same volume, and only the text was matched.
Read in Pilkington, NPNF series 1 vol. 1 (1886) · J. G. Pilkington, M.A.
Also by
- Augustine of Hippo every saying recorded of this person, and their page