Quotes from Fulton J. Sheen

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.

Many married women who have deliberately spurned the hour of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!

The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.

The egocentric is always frustrated, simply because the condition of self-perfection is self-surrender. There must be a willingness to die to the lower part of self, before there can be a birth to the nobler.

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.

The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law.

Science is not wisdom.

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.

The world would hate His followers, not because of evil in their lives, but precisely because of the absence of evil or rather their goodness. Goodness does not cause hatred, but it gives occasion for hatred to manifest itself. The holier and purer a life, the more it would attract malignity and hate. Mediocrity alone survives.

Man wants three things; life, knowledge, and love.

A woman never tells you why she loves; she just tells you how she loves.

Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.

To value only what can be sold is to defile what is truly precious. The innocent joy of childhood, the devotedness of a wife, the self sacrificing service of a daughter--none of these have an earthly market. To reduce everything to the dirty scales of economic values is to forget that some gifts, like Mary's, are so precious that the heart that offers them will be praised as long as time endures.

Because God is full of life, I imagine each morning Almighty God says to the sun, Do it again; and every evening to the moon and the stars, Do it again; and every springtime to the daisies, Do it again; and every time a child is born into the world asking for curtain call, that the heart of the God might once more ring out in the heart of the babe.

Whenever man attempts to do what he knows to be the Master's will, a power will be given him equal to the duty.

Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.

Knowing belongs to man's intellect or reason; loving belongs to his will. The object of the intellect is truth; the object of the will is goodness or love.

All love craves unity. As the highest peak of love in the human order is the unity of husband and wife in the flesh, so the highest unity in the Divine order is the unity of the soul and Christ in communion.

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.

Why is it that any time we speak of temptation we always speak of temptation as something that inclines us to wrong. We have more temptations to become good than we do to become bad.

Man is incurably curious.

Each of us makes his own weather, determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits.

We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

The nearer Christ comes to a heart, the more it becomes conscious of its guilt; it will then either ask for his mercy and find peace, or else it will turn against Him because it is not yet ready to give up its sinfulness. Thus He will separate the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff. Man's reaction to this Divine Presence will be the test: either it will call out all the opposition of egotistic natures, or else galvanize them into a regeneration and a resurrection.