"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know."

Time

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Insight & Reflection

This reflection on time by Saint Augustine resonates across generations. It highlights a fundamental truth about human nature: our continuous search for meaning in time is what ultimately defines our character and our path forward.

About Saint Augustine

Augustine of Hippo, also well-known as Saint Augustine, was a Christian theologian and philosopher from Thagaste, Numidia Cirtensis and the Bishop of Hippo Regius. He is generally regarded as one of the most influential philosophers in the history of the Western world, and he is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers of the Latin Church in the Patristic Period.

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Editorial Note: This quote is curated and fact-checked by the Quotes Archive Editorial Team. Verified Literature Specialist.

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"Our bodies are shaped to bear children, and our lives are a working out of the processes of creation. All our ambitions and intelligence are beside that great elemental point."

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"My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is."

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More about Time

"While negativity is politically useful, it is also demoralizing unless it is accompanied - and to some extent overshadowed - by elevated and inspiring ideas about the American future."

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"When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture."

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"I thank God for my failures. Maybe not at the time but after some reflection. I never feel like a failure just because something I tried has failed."

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