Confessions, Selections from Book I

I’m reading Augustine for a couple classes this semester – both City of God and Confessions. Right now I’m in the beginning of Confessions and it is… lovely :). Augustine’s thoughts are beautiful and his style is delicious. …Well, at least, it sounds good in Latin. It loses quite a bit in translation. Anyway, I’ve reproduced some particularly good bits below for your edification. For those who are Latin students, I’ve also put in the Latin, since Augustine’s Latin style is a delicacy not to be missed, and the translator’s can be taken or left.
Enjoy :).

Tu excitas, ut laudare te delectet, quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.
“You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Et cum effunderis super nos, non tu iaces, sed erigis nos. Nec tu dissiparis, sed colligis nos.
“When you are ‘poured out’ upon us, you are not wasted on the ground. You raise us upright. You are not scattered but reassemble us.”

Quid dicit aliquis, cum de te dicit? Et vae tacentibus de te, quoniam loquaces muti sunt.
“What has anyone achieved in words when he speaks about you? Yet woe to those who are silent about you because, though loquacious with verbosity, they have nothing to say.”

Et quam multi iam dies nostri et patrum nostrorum per hodiernum tuum transierunt, et ex illo acceperunt modos, et utcumque extiterunt?… Tu autem idemipse es, et omnia crastina atque ultra omniaque hesterna et retro hodie facies, hodie fecisti. Quid ad me, si quis non intellegat? Gaudeat et ipse dicens: quid est hoc? Gaudeat etiam sic, et amet non inveniendo invenire, potius quam inveniendo non invenire te.
“How many of our days and days of our fathers have passed through your Today, and have derived from it the measure and condition of their existence? … But you are the same; and all tomorrow and hereafter, and indeed all yesterday and further back, you will make a Today, you have made a Today. If anyone finds your simultaneity beyond his understanding, it is not for me to explain it. Let him be content to say, ‘What is this?’ So too let him rejoice and delight in finding you who are beyond discovery rather than fail to find you by supposing you to be discoverable.”

…Formosissime, qui formas omnia et lege tua ordinas omnia.
“The supreme beauty [formosus], you give distinct form [formus] to all things and by your law impose order on everything.”

Jussisti enim et sic est, ut poena sua sibi sit omnis inordinatus animus.
“For you have imposed order, and so it is that the punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.”

And for those of you who don’t know Latin and don’t care to learn it… Augustine’s view of studying Greek:
“The difficulty lies there: the difficulty of learning a foreign language at all. [The necessity of learning the language] sprinkles gall, as it were, over all the charm of the stories the Greeks tell.” ;)