Augustine

From this it will be easy to understand what I am calling signs; those things, that is, which are used in order to signify something else. Thus every sign is also a thing, because if it is not a thing at all then it is simply nothing. But not every single thing is also a sign. (1)

But the proper meaning of a passage, which several translators attempt to express, each according to his capacity and judgment, can only be definitely ascertained from an examination of it in the language they are translating from; and translators frequently deviate from the author’s meaning, if they are not particularly learned. So one should either aim at a knowledge of those languages from which the scriptures have come to their Latin and English versions, or else get hold of translations which have been the most strictly literal, word for word, renderings of the original, not because they are sufficient in themselves, but because they can help one to control the freedom, or even the mistakes, of those translators who have preferred to follow the meanings rather than the words of the authors. (2)

Regarding the Trinity:  “This battle of words should be avoided by keeping silent, rather than resolved by the use of speech.” (3)

We made bad use of immortality, and so ended up dying; Christ made good use of mortality, so that we might end up living. (4)

There are two things which every treatment of the scriptures should strive for: a way of attaining to an understanding of their meaning, and a way of communicating what has been understood. (5)

An eloquent man once said, you see, and what he said was true, that to be eloquent you should speak “so as to teach, to delight, to sway.” Then he added, “Teaching your audience is a matter of necessity, delighting them a matter of being agreeable, swaying them a matter of victory.” (6)

…it is more the piety of prayer than the ready facility of orators that enables him to do so; by praying then both for himself and for those he is about to address, let him be a pray-er before being a speaker. (7)

…there are many things that can be said, and many ways they can be said in by those who are well versed in such work; but who knows what is the right thing for us to say, or for someone to hear from us, at precisely this time, but the one who can see into the hearts of us all? (8)

1 Saint Augustine, Teaching Christianity (De Doctrina Christiana), ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill, vol. I/11, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press of the Focolare, 1996), 110.

2 ibid.,  143-144.

3  ibid., 112.

4  ibid., 115.

5 ibid., 207.

6 ibid., 222.

7 ibid., 226.

8 ibid., 226.