Love Quote by Saint Augustine

Augustine makes an inward turn that quietly overturns the ancient habit of treating beauty as a property of bodies, objects, or polished rhetoric. In his framing, beauty is not the prize you win by being desirable; it is the radiance that results when the soul is reordered by love. That verb "grows" matters. Love is pictured less as an event than as cultivation: a slow, organic change that takes time, practice, and the right conditions. Beauty, then, isn’t cosmetics for the self but the visible byproduct of an invisible discipline.

The subtext is Augustinian to the core: you become what you love. For him, moral life is not primarily about rule-following; it’s about orientation, the direction of desire. When love settles "within you" it doesn’t just add a pleasant feeling, it rearranges the interior hierarchy - what you fear, what you chase, what you worship. Beauty follows that rearrangement. It’s an argument against performative virtue and against status aesthetics, because it relocates the source of attractiveness to the unseen center of a person.

Context sharpens the point. Augustine wrote as Christianity was crystallizing into a public culture in the late Roman world, amid competing ideals of splendor: imperial pageantry, classical proportion, erotic allure. He’d also lived the chase for those external forms before his conversion. The line reads like a corrective born from experience: the soul is not beautified by possession, conquest, or applause, but by caritas - love ordered toward God and neighbor. It’s theology as a redefinition of taste.