Top 280 Quotes & Sayings by Fulton J. Sheen - Page 2

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

Most of us do not like to look inside ourselves for the same reason we don't like to open a letter that has bad news.

Our Lord did not ask us to give up the things of earth, but to exchange them for better things.

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.

It is easy to find truth, though it is hard to face it, and harder still to follow it.

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.

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."

If we wish to have the light, we must keep the sun; if we wish to keep our forests we must keep our trees; if we wish to keep our perfumes, we must keep our flowers- and if we wish to keep our rights, then we must keep our God.

Humility is dependence on God as pride is independence of Him. The humble soul is always the thankful soul.

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'!

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.

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.

Democracy cannot survive where there is such uniformity that everyone wears exactly the same intellectual uniform or point of view. Democracy implies diversity of outlook, a variety of points of view on politics, economics, and world affairs. Hence the educational ideal is not uniformity but unity, for unity allows diversity of points of view regarding the good means to a good end.

How could science be an enemy of religion when God commanded man to be a scientist the day He told him to rule the earth and subject it?

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.

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 basic struggle today is not between individualism and collectivism, free enterprise and socialism, democracy and dictatorship. These are only the superficial manifestations of a deeper struggle which is moral and spiritual and involves above all else whether man shall exist for the state, or the state for man, and whether freedom is of the spirit or a concession of a materialized society.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

If you do not live out your faith enthusiastically, maybe you don't have any faith.

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

I wonder maybe if our Lord does not suffer more from our indifference, than He did from the crucifixion.

Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.

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.

A smile across the aisle of a bus in the morning could save a suicide later in the day.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 than the education of other men.

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

The life of each and every one of us has been written. The crucifix is my autobiography. The blood is the ink. The nails the pen. The skin the parchment. On every line of that body I can trace my life. In the crown of thorns I can read my pride. In the hands that are dug with nails, I can read avarice and greed. In the flesh hanging from him like purple rags, I can read my lust. In feet that are fettered, I can find the times that I ran away and would not let him follow. Any sin that you can think of is written there.

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.

Charity is to be measured, not by what one has given away, but by what one has left.

Truth must be sought at all costs, but separate isolated truths will not do. Truth is like life; it has to be taken on its entirety or not at all. . . . We must welcome truth even if it reproaches and inconveniences us -- even if it appears in the place where we thought it could not be found.

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.

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 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.

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.

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. A person is great not by the ferocity of his hatred of evil, but by the intensity of his love for God. Asceticism and mortification are not the ends of a Christian life; they are only the means. The end is charity. Penance merely makes an opening in our ego in which the Light of God can pour. As we deflate ourselves, God fills us. And it is God’s arrival that is the important event.

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.

Sex has become one of the most discussed subjects of modern times. The Victorians pretended it did not exist; the moderns pretend nothing else exists.

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

One of the greatest disasters that happened to modern civilization was for democracy to inscribe "liberty" on its banners instead of "justice." Because "liberty" was considered the ideal it was not long until some men interpreted it as meaning "freedom from justice"; then when religion and decent government attempted to bring them back to justice, organized into "freedom groups" they protested that their constitutional and natural rights were being violated.

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.

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 man discovers anything big if he does not make himself small.

If the bringing of children into the world is today an economic burden, it is because the social system is inadequate; and not because God’s law is wrong. Therefore the State should remove the causes of that burden. The human must not be limited and controlled to fit the economic, but the economic must be expanded to fit the human.

It was to a virgin woman that the birth of the Son of God was announced. It was to a fallen woman that his resurrection was announced.

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.

To create the world cost God nothing; to save it from sin cost His Life Blood.

All worry is atheism, because it is a want of trust in God.

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.

We become like that which we love. If we love what is base, we become base; but if we love what is noble, we become noble.

Not only were the Jews expecting the birth of a Great King, a Wise Man and a Saviour, but Plato and Socrates also spoke of the Logos and of the Universal Wise Man 'yet to come'. Confucius spoke of 'the Saint'; the Sibyls, of a 'Universal King'; the Greek dramatist, of a saviour and redeemer to unloose man from the 'primal eldest curse'. All these were on the Gentile side of the expectation. What separates Christ from all men is that first He was expected; even the Gentiles had a longing for a deliverer, or redeemer. This fact alone distinguishes Him from all other religious leaders.

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!

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.