My Favorite Quotes from St. Augustine's Confessions

I noticed that people would name some object and then turn towards whatever it was that they had named.

Do heaven and earth, then, contain the whole of you, since you fill them? Or, when once you have filled them, is some part of you left over because they are too small to hold you? If this is so, when you have filled heaven and earth, does that part of you which remains flow over into some other place? Or is it that you have no need to be contained in anything, because you contain all things in yourself and fill them by reason of the very fact that you contain them?

As I lay alone in bed, I remembered the verses of your servant Ambrose and realized the truth of them. Then little by little, my old feelings about your handmaid came back to me.

…This is the derivation of the word cogitare, which means to think or to collect one's thoughts. For in Latin the word cogo, meaning I assemble or I collect, is related to cogito, which means I think, in the same way as ago is related to agito or facio to factito. But the word cogito is restricted to the function of the mind. It is correctly used only of what is assembled in the mind, not what is assembled elsewhere.