Quotes from Fulton J. Sheen

Animals never have recourse to law courts, because they have no will to love; but man, having reason, feels the need of justifying his irrational behavior when he does wrong.

Do not postpone relationship with this law simply because you cannot fathom its mystery intellectually.

One cannot tell when grace is coming or how it will work on the soul; whether it will come as a result of a disgust with sin

Our Lord never spoke of His Heavenly, or Risen Glory without bringing in the ignominy of the Cross.

Our Lord has a double view of us: the way He intended us to be and the way we corresponded to His grace.

It will not start with the order in the universe alluding to the existence of a Creator of the cosmos; it will start with the disorder inside of man himself.

It takes eternity to make a man despair.

The celibate is bound to feel lonely in that atmosphere, but it is a different kind of loneliness that plagues the erotic. The former is tempted because, in the natural order, he is without a partner; the other is lonely even when he has his partner, for as St. Augustine reflected: "Our hearts were made for Thee, O Lord, and they cannot rest until they rest in Thee.

Close to the Cross was the only Apostle present, John, whose face was like a cast moulded out of love; Magdalen was there too, like a broken flower, a wounded thing. But foremost among all-God pity her!-was His own mother. Mary, Magdalen, John; innocence, penitence, and priesthood; the three types of souls forever to be found beneath the Cross of Christ.

insisted that a speaker must begin his message from where his hearers are, not where he is.

a love without satiety an ecstasy without an end, a surrender to the beloved— God—without ever falling back on egotistic loneliness. Marriage and celibacy are not contraries

He seeks us before we dream of seeking him; he knocks before we invite him in; he loves us before we respond.

God alone causes faith in the believer. Faith is not the acceptance of abstract ideas. It is so often said, 'Oh, by faith you have to accept a number of dogmas.' No! Faith is participation in the life of God. In faith two persons meet. God and ourselves.

Shakespeare himself spoke of Heaven using wars as a punishment for perversities, lusts and passive barbarianism: If that the heavens do not their visible spirits Send quickly down to calm these vile offenses, It will come Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep.

If that note is made the first note in a new melody, then it will become harmonious.

The depth of a priest's compassion is the measure of his apostolic success.

We grow weary, of course, but God is unwearied in giving us new strength.

Thanks to the Spirit, though the priest grows older in years, he becomes younger through ascent to the altar of God where youth is renewed.

Truth does grow, but it grows homogeneously, like an acorn into an oak; it does not swing in the breeze, like a weathercock. The leopard does not change his spots nor the Ethiopian his skin, though the leopard be put in bars or the Ethiopian in pink tights. The nature of certain things is fixed, and none more so than the nature of truth. Truth may be contradicted a thousand times, but that only proves that it is strong enough to survive a thousand assaults.

No one can love himself properly unless he knows why he is living. Love is useless when alone

The truth that would answer this temptation was that faith in God must never contradict reason. The unreasonable venture never has the assurance of the Divine protection.

It is easy to understand why so many minds of this century flocked to the authoritarianism of the Nazi, the Fascist, or the Communist in their desperation for an ordering principle. Having no true picture of reality, butrecognizing the need of someguiding principle outside their confused, bewildered, and frustrated minds, they would throw themselves into the false ordering of dictatorship.

Three dominant evils prevailed—clerical concubinage, simony

To love what we say, it must be true. To want to speak the truth, it must be loved.