Confessions by Augustine — BOOK I: Early Years

1. 1. You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
2. 2. Augustine questions whether calling upon God or praising Him comes first, and whether knowing God precedes calling upon Him.
3. 3. God is both within all things and beyond containment by them, filling heaven and earth without being limited.
4. 4. Augustine describes God as immutable yet changing all things, never new nor old, making everything new.
5. 5. Augustine confesses his infancy as a time of sin, including jealousy and selfishness, even in a baby.
6. 6. Augustine learned to speak not through formal teaching but by observing and imitating the gestures and sounds of adults.
7. 7. Augustine hated Greek literature as a boy because of the difficulty of learning a foreign language under coercion.
8. 8. Augustine wept over the fictional death of Dido while remaining unmoved by his own spiritual death from separation from God.
9. 9. Augustine argues that the pagan myths taught in schools, such as Jupiter's adultery, encourage immoral behavior by providing divine examples.
10. 10. Augustine recalls that as a boy he was more afraid of committing a grammatical error than of hating another person.
11. 11. Augustine confesses that he stole from his parents' cellar and cheated in games as a boy, showing that even childish behavior contains the seeds of adult sin.
12. 12. Augustine thanks God for the good gifts of his childhood—existence, life, thought, memory, language, friendship—while acknowledging that he misused them by seeking pleasure in creatures rather than in God.