Fulton J. Sheen Quotes

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.

There are 200 million poor in the world who would gladly take the vow of poverty if they could eat, dress and have a home like I do

Satan always tempts the pure - the others are already his.

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.

Evil may have its hour, but God will have His day.

Pride is the king of vices...it is the first of the pallbearers of the soul...other vices destroy only their opposite virtues, as wantonness destroys chastity; greed destroys temperance; anger destroys gentleness; but pride destroys all virtues.

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

Your unhappiness is not due to your want of a fortune or high position or fame or sufficient vitamins. It is due not to a want of something outside of you, but to a want of something inside you. You were made for perfect happiness. No wonder everything short of God disappoints you.

To love what is below the human is degradation; to love what is human for the sake of the human is mediocrity; to love the human for the sake of the Divine is enriching; to love the Divine for its own sake is sanctity.

So long as there are poor, - I am poor, - So long as there are prisons, - I am a prisoner, - So long as there are sick, - I am weak, - So long as there is ignorance, - I must learn the truth, - So long as there is hate, - I must love, - So long as there is hunger, - I am famished. - Such is the identification Our Divine Lord would have us make with all whom He made in love and for love.

Judge the Catholic Church not by those who barely live by its spirit, but by the example of those who live closest to it.

No one has ever laughed at a pun who did not see in the one word a twofold meaning. To materialists this world is opaque like a curtain; nothing can be seen through it. A mountain is just a mountain, a sunset just a sunset; but to poets, artists, and saints, the world is transparent like a window pane - it tells of something beyond....a mountain tells of the Power of God, the sunset of His Beauty, and the snowflake of His Purity.

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

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

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

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.

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 term science means something quite different for our generation than it did not so many generations ago.

There are three ways in which a man becomes a slave. He may be born into slavery, or forced into it, or he can deliberately accept his servitude. All three forms flourish in the modern world. Men are born and forced into slavery in Russia and her satellites states. Men in the free world invite slavery when they ask the government to provide complete security, when they surrender their freedom to the "Welfare State."

It is a characteristic of any decaying civilization that the great masses of the people are unconscious of the tragedy. Humanity in a crisis is generally insensitive to the gravity of the times in which it lives. Men do not want to believe their own times are wicked, partly because it involves too much self-accusation and principally because they have no standards outside of themselves by which to measure their times.

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.

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.

Freedom that ignores the transcendent difference between good and evil ends in the denial of freedom itself.

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

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.

All my sermons are prepared in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. As recreation is most pleasant and profitable in the sun, so homiletic creativity is best nourished before the Eucharist. The most brilliant ideas come from meeting God face to face. The Holy Spirit that presided at the Incarnation is the best atmosphere for illumination. Pope John Paul II keeps a small desk or writing pad near him whenever he is in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament; and I have done this all my life - I am sure for the same reason he does, because a lover always works better when the beloved is with him.

The world is rapidly being divided into two camps, the comradeship of anti-Christ and the brotherhood of Christ. The lines between these two are being drawn. How long the battle will be we know not whether swords will have to be unsheathed we know not whether blood will have to be shed we know not whether it will be an armed conflict we know not. But in a conflict between truth and darkness, truth cannot lose.

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.

Modern minds no longer object to the Church because of the way they think, but because of the way they live. They no longer have difficulties with the Creed, but with her Commandments. The heresy of our day is not the heresy of thought, but of action.

Much suffering in hospitals is wasted.

All love craves unity.

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.

Before the sin, Satan assures us that it is of no consequence; after the sin, he persuades us that it is unforgivable.

Most of us love a non-self, or something extrinsic and apart from our inner life; but a mother's love during the time she is a flesh-and-blood ciborium is not for a non-self but for one that is her very self, a perfect example of charity and love which hardly perceives a separation. Motherhood then becomes a kind of priesthood. She brings God to man by preparing the flesh in which the soul will be implanted; she brings man to God in offering the child back again to the Creator.

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.

The mark of the Christian is the willingness to look for the Divine in the flesh of a babe in a crib, the continuing Christ under the appearance of bread on an altar, and a meditation and a prayer on a string of beads

God has given different gifts to different people. There is no basis for feeling inferior to another who has a different gift. Once it is realized that we shall be judged by the gift we have received, rather than the gift we have not, one is completely delivered from a false sense of inferiority.

His words even imply that philanthropy has deeper depths than is generally realized. The great emotions of compassion and mercy are traced to Him; there is more to human deeds than the doers are aware. He identified every act of kindness as an expression of sympathy with Himself. All kindnesses are either done explicitly or implicitly in His name, or they are refused explicitly or implicitly in His name.

To tell a woman who is forty, "You look like sixteen," is boloney. The blarney way of saying it is "Tell me how old you are, I should like to know at what age women are the most beautiful.

The denial of the right of ownership to a man is a denial of his basic freedom: freedom without property is always incomplete. To be "secured" - but with no accompanying responsibility - is to be the slave of whatever group provides the security.

It is not particularly difficult to find thousands who will spend two or three hours a day in exercising, but if you ask them to bend their knees to God in five minutes of prayer they protest that it is too long.

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.

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.

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.

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

A reasonable being should ask himself why - if chemicals can enter into plants, and plants be taken up into animals, and animals be taken into man - why man himself, who is the peak of visible creation, should be denied the privilege of being assimilated into a higher power? The rose has no right to say that there is no life above it and neither has man, who has a vast capacity and unconquerable yearning for eternal life and truth and love.

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.

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