Fulton J. Sheen Quotes

113 Sourced Quotes

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.

Fulton J. Sheen
The higher the love, the more demands will be made on us to conform to that ideal.

Fulton J. Sheen
God could not keep, as it were, the secret of His love, and the telling of it was creation.

Fulton J. Sheen
Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.

Fulton J. Sheen
Nothing ever happens in the world that does not happen first inside human hearts.

Fulton J. Sheen
All our anxieties relate to time. … The major problems of psychiatry revolve around an analysis of the despair, pessimism, melancholy, and complexes that are the inheritances of what has been or with the fears, anxieties, worries, that are the imaginings of what will be.

Fulton J. Sheen
The world would hate His followers, not because of evil in their lives, but precisely because of the absence of evil or rather their goodness. Goodness does not cause hatred, but it gives occasion for hatred to manifest itself. The holier and purer a life, the more it would attract malignity and hate. Mediocrity alone survives.

Fulton J. Sheen
One function of the angels is illumination, and the other function is that of being a guardian.

Fulton J. Sheen
The very freedom which the sinner supposedly exercises in his self-indulgence is only another proof that he is ruled by the tyrant.

Fulton J. Sheen
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.

Fulton J. Sheen
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!

Fulton J. Sheen
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.

Fulton J. Sheen
To see a priest making his meditation before Mass does more for an altar boy's vocation than a thousand pieces of inspirational literature.

Fulton J. Sheen
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."

Fulton J. Sheen
It is not easy to explain why God permits evil; but it is impossible for an atheist to explain the existence of goodness. How could a spiritless, soul-less, cross-less, Godless universe become the center of faith, purity, sacrifice, and martyrdom? How can decency be the decent thing if there is no God? Since God is love, why should we be surprised that want of it should end in pain, hate, broken hearts, and war?

Fulton J. Sheen
The workmen in a factory may have a shadowy, unknown absentee "employer" - the thousands of individual owners of stock - whom "management" represents and tries to please by extra dividends. The workman's livelihood is at the disposition of strangers who make a single demand of their representatives: higher profits.

Fulton J. Sheen
Do mathematics have a relation to reality or are they only a mathematical symbol?

Fulton J. Sheen
To fall in love means to fall into something... And that something is responsibility.

Fulton J. Sheen
Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior.

Fulton J. Sheen
The modern man, finding that Humanism and Sex both fail to satisfy, seeks his happiness in Science... But Science fails too, for it is something more than a knowledge of matter the soul craves.

Fulton J. Sheen
There is a tendency among many shallow thinkers of our day to teach that every human act is a reflex, over which we do not exercise human control. They would rate a generous deed as no more praiseworthy than a wink, a crime as no more voluntary than a sneeze... Such a philosophy undercuts all human dignity... All of us have the power of choice in action at every moment of our lives.

Fulton J. Sheen
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.

Fulton J. Sheen
Buddha wrote a code which he said would be useful to guide men in darkness, but he never claimed to be the Light of the world. Buddhism was born with a disgust for the world, when a prince's son deserted his wife and child, turning from the pleasures of existence to the problems of existence. Burnt by the fires of the world, and already weary with it, Buddha turned to ethics.

Fulton J. Sheen
Nature gives man corn but he must grind it; God gives man a will but he must make the right choices.

Fulton J. Sheen
If we had intellectual vigour enough to ascend from effects to causes, we would explain political, economical and social phenomena less by credit sheets, balance of trade and reparations than by our attitude towards God.

Fulton J. Sheen
Possession properly has two faces, two aspects: we all have a right to private property, but this is accompanied by our responsibility for its righteous use. These two things (which should be inseparable) are frequently divided today. Everyone admits that the farmer who own a horse is obligated to feed and care for it, but in the case of stocks and bonds, we often forget that the same principle should prevail.

Fulton J. Sheen
The pacifist thinks that the alternative to war is peace; it is not. Sometimes the alternative is oppression. Sometimes certain God-given rights and liberties can be preserved only by resistance to that which would destroy them. And to defend certain basic God-given rights and liberties is not immoral but righteous.

Fulton J. Sheen
Love was meant to be also a sign, a symbol, a messenger, a telltale of the Divine. Love is a messenger from God saying that every human affection and every ecstasy of love are sparks from the great flame of love that is God.

Fulton J. Sheen
Some representatives of monopolistic capitalism, sensing this evil in their system, have tried to silence criticism by pointing to the diffused ownership in the great corporations. They advertise, "No one owns more than 4 percent of the stock of this great company." Or they print lists of stockholders, showing that these include farmers, schoolteachers, baseball players, taxi drivers, and even babies.

Fulton J. Sheen
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!

Fulton J. Sheen