Quotes from Frank Sheed

ours is the only spirit which is a soul, so ours is the only soul which is a spirit.

If we are continuously producing things which have no attribute of matter, there must be in us some element which is not matter, to produce them. This element we call spirit.

Our ideas are not material. They have no resemblance to our body. Their resemblance is to our spirit. They have no shape, no size, no color, no weight, no space. Neither has spirit whose offspring they are. But no one can call it nothing; for it produces thought, and thought is the most powerful thing in the world—unless love is, which spirit also produces.

A spirit differs from a material thing by having no parts. Once we have mastered the meaning of this, we are close to our goal.

If it occupies space at all, be it ever so microscopic, or so infinitesimally submicroscopic, there must be some "spread." Space is simply what matter spreads its parts in. But a being with no parts at all has no spread; space and it have nothing whatever in common; it is spaceless; it is superior to the need for space.

before the universe" means when there wasn't any when; which is to say that it doesn't mean anything at all.

Yet the human soul is the lowest of spirits. The least of the angels is unimaginably superior in power

Here the dialogue form breaks down. From the believer's mouth there emerges what can only be called a soup of words, sentences that begin and do not end, words that change into something else halfway. This goes on for a longer or shorter time.

The man who does not see God may have vast knowledge of this or that section of being, but he is like a man who should know all about the eye never having seen a face.

It is obviously an overwhelming limitation that one never wholly possesses one's self, that one possesses one's being in successive moments and not simply in one act of being, that one is never all there. There is no such limitation in God. He possesses Himself wholly in one act of being. This is what we call His ETERNITY.

a community is a multitude united by agreement about the things they love.

Whatever the soul in charity loves, it loves for what of God is in it, the amount of God's goodness it expresses or mirrors. This is true love, since it means loving things or persons not for what we can get out of them but for what God has put into them, not for what they can do for us but for what is real in them: it means loving things or persons for what they are, and it is rooted in loving God for what He is.

We say that a given habit grows on us. Really it grows in us, becomes second nature.

It would be a strange God who could be loved better by being known less. Love of God is not the same thing as knowledge of God; love of God is immeasurably more important than knowledge of God; but if a man loves God knowing a little about Him, he should love God more from knowing more about Him: for every new thing known about God is a new reason for loving Him.

We possess our being, the philosophers say, successively.

One of the results of the Fall of Man is that imagination has got completely out of hand; and even one who does not believe in that "considerable catastrophe ", as Hilaire Belloc calls it, must at least admit that imagination plays a part in the mind's affairs totally out of proportion to its merits, so much out of proportion indeed as to suggest some longstanding derangement in man's nature.

The universe God called into being has in it these two great divisions—the world of spirits and the world of matter.

The first effect of realizing that one is made of nothing is a kind of panic-stricken insecurity. One looks round for some more stable thing to clutch, and in this matter none of the beings of our experience are any more stable than we, for at the origin of them all is the same truth: all are made of nothing.

He was the man. He was the representative man. For the angels the testing had been individual; each angel who fell did so by his own decision.

the sin of the representative man.

it is by the saints, and not by the mediocre, still less by the great sinners, that the Church is to be judged. It may seem a loading of the dice to demand that any institution be judged solely by its best members, but in this instance it is not. A medicine must be judged not by those who buy it but by those who actually take it. A Church must be judged by those who hear and obey, not by those who half-hear and disobey when obedience is difficult.

Truth is light too. Not to see it is to be in darkness, to see it wrong is to be in double darkness.

The soul has two faculties and they should be clearly distinguished. There is the will: its work is to love—and so to choose, to decide, to act. There is the intellect: its work is TO KNOW, TO UNDERSTAND, TO SEE: to see what—TO SEE WHAT'S THERE.

We cannot always analyse intimacy; but there is no mistaking it: we know the person quite differently. You do not learn intimacy, or reap the fruit of someone else's. You grow into it. In the Gospels one really can grow into this intimacy with Our Lord, precisely because the evangelists do not obtrude their own personalities. Anyhow, know Him we must.