Quotes from Fulton J. Sheen

There were only two classes of people who heard the cry Christmas night: shepherds and wise men. Shepherds: those who know they know nothing. Wise men: those who know they do not know everything. Only the very simple and very learned discovered God - never the man with one book.

All round about us, in our parishes, in our daily contacts with men, are countless masses of souls that are like gold ingots covered with dross. And we, if we but had the fire of the Spirit, would burnish them into jewels of the Kingdom of God!

But this humiliation which began in Bethlehem when He was conceived in the Virgin Mary was only the first of many to counteract the pride of man, until the final humiliation of death on the Cross.

Sacrifice without love is pain. Pain with love is sacrifice. Pain without love is misery. Love without pain is heaven. Love with pain is purgatory. Pain without love is hell.

the right to self-preservation could become egotism, and the power of generation could become license

evil is revealed when there is seen what it does to one who is loved.

libido, or concupiscence, a tending toward certain things in defiance of rational restraint.

God can do something with those who see what they really are and who know their need of cleansing but can do nothing with the man who feels himself worthy.

A deep spiritual bond exists between Christians, Moslems and Jews, for as Pope Pius XII said, all Christians are "spiritual Semites" because we are descended spiritually from Abraham.

there are only two philosophies of life: one is first the feast, then the headache; the other is first the fast and then the feast.

The Old Testament begins with the Genesis of heaven and earth through God making all things. The New Testament had another kind of Genesis, in the sense that it describes the making of all things new.

Deferred joys purchased by sacrifice are always sweetest and most enduring.

People are turning away from Christianity today not because it is too hard but because it is too soft.

greatest poverty of all—the spiritual poverty of seeming abandonment by God:

Pain is sacrifice without love. Sacrifice is pain with love. When we understand this, then we shall have an answer for those who feel that God should have let us sin without pain:

There would be a course on the philosophy of history; another year the philosophy of Marxism, another the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of science, etc. All of these were presented in the light of the thought of St. Thomas.

The porter who took my bag said to me: "Everybody knows you; it must be wonderful to be a bishop." And I said to him: "Suppose you had four hundred children and ten were very sick and five were dying. Would you not worry and stay awake at night? Well, that is my family. It is not as wonderful as you think.

Virginity among pagans meant a bodily condition, a physical intactness, a preserved isolation, to which there was nothing corresponding in the man. Hence pagans never glorified the virgin man, but only the virgin maid. But with Christianity, virginity ceased to mean physical intactness but unity. It meant not separation but relationship, not the will of another person alone, but also the will of God.

Peace also implies order, the subordination of the body to the soul, of the senses to reason, and of the creature to the Creator.

The more you are led by God's love, the more you become yourself and it is all done without ever losing your freedom.

yet to be daily committed to the greatest of all wars—the one waged within.

New Paganism may be defined as an outlook on life that holds to the sufficiency of human science without faith, and the sufficiency of human power without grace. In other words, its two tenets are Scientism which is a deification of the experimental method, and Humanism, which is a glorification of a man who makes God to his own image and likeness.

We hate others, and call it "zeal"; we flatter others because of what they can do for us, and call it "love"; we lie to them, and call it "tact.

Here is the answer to the riddle of love. Love implies relation. If lived in isolation, it becomes selfishness; if absorbed in collectivity, it loses its personality and, therefore, the right to love.