Quotes from Fulton J. Sheen

This is a very imperfect analogy, because the nature of a thing is not a core but a principle.

No soul ever fell away from God without giving up prayer. Prayer is that which establishes contact with the divine power and opens the invisible resources of heaven. However dark the way, when we pray, temptation can never master us. The first step downward in the average soul is the giving up of the practice of prayer, the breaking of the circuit with divinity, and the proclamation of one's own self-sufficiency.

Abstraction is the condition of the science of metaphysics, but in no way is its content.

Since evil is nothing positive, there can be no principle of evil. It has no meaning expect in reference to something good.

We simply cannot put a man into a crucible to see if he will give off unmistakable green fumes of envy.

He has mercy on those who fear Him, from generation to generation." Fear is here understood as filial, that is, a shrinking from hurting one who is loved. Such is the fear a son has for a devoted father and the fear a Christian has of Christ. Fear is here related to love.

Love begins when duty finishes. It is a giving of the cloak when the coat is taken. It is walking the extra mile.

These four effects of love are: unity, mutual indwelling, ecstasy, and zeal.

One would not generally put garbage into the stomach, but too often one will put garbage into the mind.

The very word mercy is derived from the Latin miserum cor, a sorrowful heart. Mercy is, therefore, a compassionate understanding of another's unhappiness.

As life goes on, they become not two compatible beings who have learned to live together through self-suppression and patience, but one new and richer being, fused in the fires of God's love and tempered of the best of both. One by one, the veils of life's mysteries have been lifted. The flesh, they found, was too precocious to reveal its own mystery; then came the mystery of the other's inner life, disclosed in the raising of young minds and hearts in the ways of God;

A] young husband with an unfaithful wife, who is consecrated and dedicated to continence, eats daily of the Bread of Life so that the bride may one day return to both the home and the faith.

Love itself starts with the desire for something good.

THOSE who start with the pagan philosophy of sex must face life as a descent. Associated with a growing old, there is a loss of physical energy and the horrible perspective of death. The Christian philosophy of love, on the contrary, implies an ascension. The body may grow older, but the Spirit grows younger, and love often becomes more intense.

As scientific truths put us in an intelligent relaton with the cosmos, as historic truth puts us in temporal relation with the rise and fall of civilization, so does Christ put us in intelligent relation with God the Father; for He is the only possible Word by which God can address Himself to a world of sinners.

In sex the male adores the female. In love the man and woman together adore God.

Our Lord was born not just of her flesh but also by her consent.

Conscience, Christ, and the gift of faith make evil men uneasy in their sin. They feel that if they could drive Christ from the earth, they would be free from moral inhibitions. They forget that it is their own nature and conscience which makes them feel that way. Being unable to drive God from the heavens, they would drive his ambassadors from the earth. In a lesser sphere, that is why many men sneer at virtue--because it makes vice uncomfortable.

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

Like all great divorces, whether they be marital or epistemological, it had its antecedents in history.

Philosophy, like science, is only a collection of hypotheses, introduced for the usefulness of the ensemble, or for economy of thought.

These are but a few specimens of philosophy which is no longer conscious of its own intrinsic worth, and which sees no higher mission in life for itself than applying the categories of the material to the spiritual, of the physical to the mental, and the spatio-temporal to the eternal.

Facts themselves do not give knowledge

It is possible to love more than we know. A simple person in good faith may have a greater love of God than a theologian and, as a result, a keener understanding of the ways of God with the heart than psychologists have.