Quotes from Fulton J. Sheen

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.

Repentance is not concerned with consequences. This is what distinguishes it from remorse, which is inspired principally by fear of unpleasant consequences

Like train announcers, they know all the stations, but never travel. Head knowledge is worthless, unless accompanied by submission of the will and right action.

Truth never appeals to us unless it is personal.

Carnal love, despite its seeming intimacy, often can become an exchange of egotisms. The ego is projected onto the other person and what is loved is not the other person, but the pleasure the other person gives.

As Augustine observed: "Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty, so ancient and so new. Late have I loved Thee.

The sciences need philosophy; philosophy, in turn, needs the sciences. On both sides, certain naive minds, too confident in their own forces and satisfied with ideas entirely too superficial, believed in the universal value of a single method. On both side a severe critique must lead each method back to its just limits, and teach them to ask aid of the other methods and manners of approach which, by their convergence, will permit the mind to embrace the diverse aspects of reality

The physical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts there is no higher knowledge than the empirical knowledge of scientific phenomena. The mathematical method becomes a philosophy when it asserts that some higher knowledge is needed to explain scientific facts, and that higher knowledge is mathematics.

The Church knows too that to marry the present age and its spirit is to become a widow in the next.

In divorce cases, this is called "mental torture" or "domination." Really, it is egocentricity, in which one ego loves itself in the other ego. The I is projected into the Thou and is loved in the Thou. The Thou is not really loved as a person; it is only used as a means to the pleasure of the I. As soon as the other ceases to exhilarate, the so-called love ceases.

The first part, or the Æsthetics, which has nothing in common with art, disengages the a priori forms of sensible knowledge, namely, the forms of space and time, which furnish mathematics with their object. Æsthetics thus divorced mathematics from reality, for it makes the condition of mathematics not the real, but a mental form of space and time.

The question: 'is the Euclidean geometry true?' has no significance for Poincaré, for these is no such thing as one geometry being more true than another.

Physical experience is the translation of phenomena into symbolic language, and the law is the creation of the wind or a symbol.

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.

God prefers a loving sinner to a loveless "saint." Love can be trained; pride cannot. The man who thinks that he knows will rarely find truth; the man who knows he is a miserable, unhappy sinner, like the woman at the well, is closer to peace, joy and salvation than he knows.

It is a curious psychological fact that those who make their personal love public, and "dear" one another with saccharine epithets, are very often those who when alone quarrel and fight.

The very fact that a man or a woman seeks a new partner is a proof that there never was any love at all, for though sex is replaceable, love is not.

As love comes from knowledge, so hatred comes from want of knowledge. Bigotry is the fruit of ignorance.

Even in the realm of pure mathematics, the mathematician may use any set of symbols he desires within any given region of space-time; he may even go so far as to maintain that any one set of symbols fits the scheme as well as any other, but to erect this method into a philosophy and confuse independence of any one special meaning with independence of all meaning is unjustified and unwarranted.

The mathematical method is disinterested in the efficient cause and the final cause or the goodness of a thing and it should not be so disinterested.

The familiar would of sense experience is not entirely objectively real, but is to some extent a product of the scientists' reasoning.

Hearing is the motion of molecules; sound is a wave in the atmosphere; solidity is the characteristic of spatial juxtaposition of atoms; smell is something given off by a body, rather than something belonging to a body.

Do mathematics have a relation to reality or are they only a mathematical symbol?

George Bernard Shaw once said, "It is a pity that youth has been wasted on the young." The contrary is true. It is no secret at all that the Good Lord knew that it was better to put the illusions of life at the beginning in order that as we grew closer to eternity, we might the better see the purpose of living.