Though I was retreating from the truth, I appeared to myself to be goi — Confessions (Augustine)

"What is it now to me, O my true Life, my God, that my declaiming was applauded above that of many of my classmates and fellow students? Actually, was not all that smoke and wind? Besides, was there nothing else on which I could have exercised my wit and tongue? Thy praise, O Lord, thy praises might have propped up the tendrils of my heart by thy Scriptures; and it would not have been dragged away by these empty trifles, a shameful prey to the spirits of the air."

"But why, then, did I dislike Greek learning, which was full of such tales? For Homer was skillful in inventing such poetic fictions and is most sweetly wanton; yet when I was a boy, he was most disagreeable to me. I believe that Virgil would have the same effect on Greek boys as Homer did on me if they were forced to learn him. For the tedium of learning a foreign language mingled gall into the sweetness of those Grecian myths. For I did not understand a word of the language, and yet I was driven with threats and cruel punishments to learn it."

"Those things which thou hast given me shall be developed and perfected."

"Thus thou mayest gather me up out of those fragments in which I was torn to pieces, while I turned away from thee, O Unity, and lost myself among “the many.”"

"It is as if he should feel that there is an enemy who could be more destructive to himself than that hatred which excites him against his fellow man; or that he could destroy him whom he hates more completely than he destroys his own soul by this same hatred."

"I was no longer an infant who could not speak, but now a chattering boy. I remember this, and I have since observed how I learned to speak. ...[W]hen I was unable to communicate ...by means of whimperings and grunts and various gestures of my limbs (...to reinforce my demands), I ...repeated the sounds ...stored in my memory by the mind which thou, O my God, hadst given me. When they called some thing by name and pointed it out... I saw it and realized that the thing... was called by the name they then uttered. ...[W]hat they meant was made plain by the gesture ... a kind of natural language, common to all ...which expresses itself through changes of countenance, glances of the eye, gestures and intonations which indicate a disposition and attitude―either to seek or to possess, to reject or to avoid. So... by frequently hearing words, in different phrases, I gradually identified the objects which the words stood for and, having formed my mouth to repeat these signs, I was thereby able to express my will."