Fulton J. Sheen quotes:

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  • Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.

  • I feel it is time that I also pay tribute to my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

  • Show me your hands. Do they have scars from giving? Show me your feet. Are they wounded in service? Show me your heart. Have you left a place for divine love?

  • The greatest love story of all time is contained in a tiny white Host.

  • Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

  • Pride is an admission of weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals.

  • Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.

  • The Soviet Union is like the Cross without Christ, while American culture is like Christ without the Cross.

  • All badness is spoiled goodness. A bad apple is a good apple that became rotten. Because evil has no capital of its own, it is a parasite that feeds on goodness.

  • The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.

  • It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished.

  • Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.

  • Our happiest times are those in which we forget ourselves, usually in being kind to someone else. That tiny moment of self-abdication is an act of true humility: the man who loses himself finds himself and finds his happiness.

  • Ever since the days of Adam, man has been hiding from God and saying, 'God is hard to find.

  • Nothing can do men of good will more harm than apparent compromises with parties that subscribe to antimoral and antidemocratic and anti-God forces. We must have the courage to detach our support from men who are doing evil. We must bear them no hatred, but we must break with them.

  • The proud man counts his newspaper clippings, the humble man his blessings.

  • Advertising tries to stimulate our sensuous desires, converting luxuries into necessities, but it only intensifies man's inner misery. The business world is bent on creating hungers which its wares never satisfy, and thus it adds to the frustrations and broken minds of our times.

  • There are angels near you to guide you and protect you, if you would but invoke them. It is not later than we think, it is a bigger world than we think.

  • Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.

  • There are ultimately only two possible adjustments to life; one is to suit our lives to principles; the other is to suit principles to our lives. If we do not live as we think, we soon begin to think as we live. The method of adjusting moral principles to the way men live is just a perversion of the order of things.

  • There is no other subject on which the average mind is so much confused as the subject of tolerance and intolerance... Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to principles. Intolerance applies only to principles, but never to persons.

  • The world is living today in what might be described as an era of carnality, which glorifies sex, hates restraint, identifies purity with coldness, innocence with ignorance, and turns men and women into Buddhas with their eyes closed, hands folded across their breasts, intently looking inward, thinking only of self.

  • Wars come from egotism and selfishness. Every macrocosmic or world war has its origin in microcosmic wars going on inside millions and millions of individuals.

  • Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them.

  • Counsel involving right and wrong should never be sought from a man who does not say his prayers.

  • Today (1950), the hatred of the Moslem countries against the West is becoming hatred against Christianity itself. Although the statesmen have not yet taken it into account, there is still grave danger that the temporal power of Islam may return and, with it, the menace that it may shake off a West which has ceased to be Christian, and affirm itself as a great anti-Christian world Power.

  • Each of us comes into life with fists closed, set for aggressiveness and acquisition. But when we abandon life our hands are open; there is nothing on earth that we need, nothing the soul can take with it.

  • When we die to something, something comes alive within us. If we die to self, charity comes alive; if we die to pride, service comes alive; if we die to lust, reverence for personality comes alive; if we die to anger, love comes alive.

  • Head knowledge is worthless, unless accompanied by submission of the will and right action.

  • Many married women who have deliberately spurned the hour of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!

  • There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.

  • Never forget that there are only two philosophies to rule your life: the one of the cross, which starts with the fast and ends with the feast. The other of Satan, which starts with the feast and ends with the headache.

  • Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!

  • The Christmas gift of peace was the uncoiling of the links of a triple chain that first unites a person with God, then with himself, then with his neighbor.

  • Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.

  • Souls generally do not fall away from Christ because of the Creed; they first have difficulty with the Commandments.

  • Freedom is not just something with which we are born; it is something we achieve. America did not receive a perpetual endowment of freedom; it has had to struggle and fight to preserve it. Freedom is not an heirloom or an antique; it is a life that must fight against the corrosive powers of death and nourish itself on the daily bread of goodness and virtue.

  • Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.

  • Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man. The industrial civilization of the Western world has no intent to destroy man's freedom or to deny his personality. But Communism does. Denying God, it reduces man to a robot.

  • The Rosary is the best therapy for these distraught, unhappy, fearful, and frustrated souls, precisely because it involves the simultaneous use of three powers: the physical, the vocal, and the spiritual, and in that order.

  • Live each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance toward the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point. So climb slowly, enjoying each passing moment; and then the view from the summit will serve a more rewarding climax for your journey.

  • Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday.

  • The egocentric is always frustrated, simply because the condition of self-perfection is self-surrender. There must be a willingness to die to the lower part of self, before there can be a birth to the nobler.

  • Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience towards evil and a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. But what is more important than the definition is the field of its application. The important point here is this: Tolerance applies only to persons but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth but never to persons. Tolerance applies to the erring; intolerance to the error.

  • Nothing is more destined to create deep-seated anxieties in people than the false assumption that life should be free from anxieties.

  • Baloney is flattery laid on so thick it cannot be true, and blarney is flattery so thin we love it.

  • A man without God is not like a cake without raisins; he is like a cake without the flour and milk; he lacks the essential ingredients.

  • Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil... a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons... never to truth.

  • A Catholic may sin and sin as badly as anyone else, but no genuine Catholic ever denies he is a sinner. A Catholic wants his sins forgiven - not excused or sublimated.

  • Every man rejoices twice when he has a partner in his joy. He who shares tears with us wipes them away. He divides them in two, and he who laughs with us makes the joy double.

  • Gaston Milhaud, like many of his contemporaries, sought to overthrow empirical positivism by insisting on the fundamental reality of the mind, but mind conceived in the Kantian sense. The knowledge of nature is symbolic, and there is no necessary connection between the phenomena and our fictions.

  • But there was no room at the inn"; the inn is the gathering place of public opinion; so often public opinion locks its doors to the King.

  • God does not love us because we are valuable. We are valuable because God loves us.

  • There are two ways of waking up in the morning. One is to say, 'Good morning, God,' and the other is to say, 'Good God, morning'!

  • The old liberal rebelled against taxation without responsibility, the new liberal wants the taxation as a handout without responsibility.

  • Liberty is no heirloom. It requires the daily bread of self-denial, the salt of law and, above all, the backbone of acknowledging responsibility for our deeds.

  • for a woman, love is its own reason. "I love you because I love you.

  • When we try to make everything clear, we make everything confused. If, however, we admit one mysterious thing in the universe, then everything else becomes clear in the light of that. The sun is so bright, so mysterious, that one cannot look at it, and yet in the light of the sun everything else is seen.

  • The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law.

  • Believe the incredible and you can do the impossible.

  • Joy is the happiness of love - love aware of its own inner happiness. Pleasure comes from without, and joy comes from within, and it is, therefore, within reach of everyone in the world....

  • We must go out to Pure Life, Pure Truth, Pure Love, and that is the definition of God. He is the ultimate goal of life; from Him we came, and in Him alone do we find our peace.

  • The mark of man is initiative, but the mark of woman is cooperation. Man talks about freedom; woman about sympathy, love, sacrifice. Man cooperates with nature; woman cooperates with God. Man was called to till the earth, to "rule over the earth"; woman to be the bearer of a life that comes from God.

  • The way not to lead a monotonous life is to live for others.

  • Everything that is full of life loves change, for the characteristic of life is movement toward a new goal and urges toward new pleasures

  • If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself. You have a duty to worship God, not because He will be imperfect and unhappy if you do not, but because you will be imperfect and unhappy.

  • Love is the key to the mystery. Love by its very nature is not selfish, but generous. It seeks not its own, but the good of others. The measure of love is not the pleasure it gives-that is the way the world judges it-but the joy and peace it can purchase for others.

  • Grace does not work like a penny in a slot machine. Grace will move you only when you want it to move you, and only when you let it move you. The supernatural order supposes the freedom of the natural order, but it does not destroy it.

  • Faced with such insecurity, labor unions seek a solution in demands for higher wages, shorter hours, pensions, and such things. But this approach takes monopolistic capitalism for granted, and accepts the unnatural division between property and responsibility as permanent. A much more radical solution is apt to come, and this may take either of two forms.

  • We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

  • We can think of Lent as a time to eradicate evil or cultivate virtue, a time to pull up weeds or to plant good seeds. Which is better is clear, for the Christian ideal is always positive rather than negative.

  • Patience is power. Patience is not an absence of action; rather it is "timing" it waits on the right time to act, for the right principles and in the right way.

  • The power of the rosary is beyond description.

  • Leisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery, or a waterfall.

  • Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn

  • The simple shepherds heard the voice of an angel and found their Lamb the wise men saw the light of a star and found their Wisdom

  • The only way to win audiences is to tell people about the life and death of Christ. Every other approach is a waste

  • If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.

  • Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything.

  • Once you have surrendered yourself, you make yourself receptive. In receiving from God, you are perfected and completed.

  • The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.

  • The loves of all hearts are so many mirrors revealing their characters.

  • To deny the necessity or value of metaphysics is to assert a metaphysical principle, just as to say a religion must be without dogmas is to assert a dogma.

  • The wicked fear the good, because the good are a constant reproach to their consciences. The ungodly like religion in the same way that they like lions, either dead or behind bars; they fear religion when it breaks loose and begins to challenge their consciences.

  • from - Your Life is Worth Living: If it be a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God,It is a more terrible thing to fall out of them.

  • Man wants three things; life, knowledge, and love.

  • Why is it that any time we speak of temptation we always speak of temptation as something that inclines us to wrong. We have more temptations to become good than we do to become bad.

  • The difference between the love of a man and the love of a woman is that a man will always give reasons for loving, but a woman gives no reasons for loving.

  • Knowing belongs to man's intellect or reason; loving belongs to his will. The object of the intellect is truth; the object of the will is goodness or love.

  • A teacher who cannot explain any abstract subject to a child does not himself thoroughly understand his subject; if he does not attempt to break down his knowledge to fit the child's mind, he does not understand teaching.

  • Christianity, unlike any other religion in the world, begins with catastrophe and defeat. Sunshine religions and psychological inspirations collapse in calamity and wither in adversity. But the Life of the Founder of Christianity, having begun with the Cross, ends with the empty tomb and victory.

  • There are two ways of knowing how good God is: one is never to lose Him, and the other is to lose Him and then to find Him.

  • The big print giveth and the fine print taketh away.

  • Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.

  • Skeptics always want miracles such as stepping down from the Cross, but never the greater miracle of forgiveness.

  • So the divine love is sacrificial love. Love does not mean to have and to own and to possess. It means to be had and to be owned and to be possessed. It is not a circle circumscribed by self, it is arms outstretched to embrace all humanity within its grasp.

  • Prayer begins by talking to God, but it ends by listening to Him. In the face of Absolute Truth, silence is the soul's language.

  • In every friendship hearts grow and entwine themselves together, so that the two hearts seem to make only one heart with only a common thought. That is why separation is so painful; it is not so much two hearts separating, but one being torn asunder.

  • Never measure your generosity by what you give, but rather by what you have left.

  • When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.

  • The big print giveth, and the fine print taketh away.

  • Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.

  • Each and every one of us, at the end of the journey of life, will come face to face with either one or the other of two faces... And one of them, either the merciful face of Christ or the miserable face of Satan, will say, "Mine, mine." May we be Christ's!

  • The humble, simple souls, who are little enough to see the bigness of God in the littleness of a Babe, are therefore the only ones who will ever understand the reason of His visitation. He came to this poor earth of ours to carry on an exchange; to say to us, as only the Good God could say: 'you give me your humanity, and I will give you my Divinity; you give me your time, and I will give you My eternity; you give me your broken heart, and I will give you Love; you give me your nothingness, and I will give you My all.

  • Freedom does not mean that right to do whatever we please, but rather to do as we ought. The right to do whatever we please reduces freedom to a physical power and forgets that freedom is a moral power.

  • Joy is not the same as pleasure or happiness. A wicked and evil man may have pleasure, while any ordinary mortal is capable of being happy. Pleasure generally comes from things, and always through the senses; happiness comes from humans through fellowship. Joy comes from loving God and neighbor. Pleasure is quick and violent, like a flash of lightning. Joy is steady and abiding, like a fixed star. Pleasure depends on external circumstances, such as money, food, travel, etc. Joy is independent of them, for it comes from a good conscience and love of God.

  • Civilization is always in danger when those who have never learned to obey are given the right to command.

  • Evil is thus a kind of parasite on goodness. If there were no good by which to measure things, evil could not exist. Men sometimes forget this, and say, there is so much evil in the world that there cannot be a God. They are forgetting that, if there were no God, they would have no way of distinguishing evil from goodness. The very concept of evil admits and recognizes a Standard, a Whole, a Rule, an Order. Nobody would say that his automobile was out of order if he did not have a conception of how an automobile ought to run.

  • Most commit the same mistake with God that they do with their friends: they do all the talking.

  • Help someone in distress and you lighten your own burden; the very joy of alleviating the sorrow of another is the lessening of one's own.

  • Modern prophets say that our economics have failed us. No! It is not our economics which have failed; it is man who has failed-man who has forgotten God. Hence no manner of economic or political readjustment can possibly save our civilization; we can be saved only by a renovation of the inner man, only by a purging of our hearts and souls; for only by seeking first the Kingdom of God and His Justice will all these other things be added unto us.

  • Calamity, war, famine, plague, death, adversity, disease, injury do not necessarily produce repentance. We may become better in a calamity but it does not necessarily make us repent. The essence of repentance is that we cannot be repentant until we confront our own self righteousness with God's righteousness.

  • The fact the enemies of God must face is that modern civilization has conquered the world, but in doing so has lost its soul. And in losing its soul it will lose the very world it gained. Even our own so-called Liberal culture in these United States which has tried to avoid complete secularization by leaving little zones of individual freedom is in danger of forgetting that these zones were preserved only because religion was in their soul. And as religion fades so will freedom, for only where the spirit of God is, is there liberty.

  • The rosary is the book of the blind, where souls see and there enact the greatest drama of love the world has ever known; it is the book of the simple, which initiates them into mysteries and knowledge more satisfying that the education of other men; it is the book of the aged, whose eyes close upon the shadow of this world, and open on the substance of the next. The power of the rosary is beyond description.

  • Very few people believe in the devil these days, which suits the devil very well. He is always helping to circulate the news of his own death. The essence of God is existence, and He defines Himself as: 'I am Who am.' The essence of the devil is the lie, and he defines himself as: 'I am who am not.' Satan has very little trouble with those who do not believe in him; they are already on his side.

  • A woman gets angry when a man denies his faults, because she knew them all along. His lying mocks her affection; it is the deceit that angers her more than the faults.

  • Many souls fail to find God because they want a religion which will remake society without remaking themselves.

  • Modern man has so long preached a doctrine of false tolerance; he has so long believed that right and wrong were only differences in a point of view, that now when evil works itself out in practice he is paralyzed to do anything against it.

  • When a child is given to his parents, a crown is made for that child in Heaven, and woe to the parents who raise a child without consciousness of that eternal crown!

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