Quotes from Fulton J. Sheen

Patience is power. Patience is not an absenc of action; rather it is timing, it waits on the right time to act, for the right priciples and in the right way

This is what Aristotle meant when he said that the object of science is the necessary and the universal; man and not this man.

The Angelic Doctor himself is not certain that the astronomical theories of his own time explain the heavens and the movements of the sun and the stars

In a like manner, as soon as we know the meaning of being and the meaning of nonbeing, we know that a thing cannot be and not be at one and the same time, and under the same formal consideration.

Any event or group of events may be viewed from different degrees of abstraction. A man jumps from a bridge. The psychologists make abstraction from everything except the mental state which prompted the suicide; the biologists abstract from everything except the dying organism; while the physicists are interested in the man, not as mind, or as organism, but as a falling body.

For the Angelic Doctor, the reason of conceptual knowledge is just the contrary! It is not his distance from the animal that renders abstraction necessary; it is his distance from God. Abstraction is not a condition of a push from below; it is a result of a fall from above. Abstraction is necessary because our intellect is imperfect. This is the fundamental reason.

The 'fullness of reality' in the second sense of the term is perceived by a combination of both intellect and sense, the senses knowing the particular characteristics, the intellect knowing the nature.

The physicist takes water, abstracts its quantitatively measurable aspects, reaches results about these aspects, and ignores the rest.

Being is the soul of every concept, of every judgment and of every reasoning.

The pure in heart shall see God, because they always do His will. Purity does not begin in the body but in the will. From there it flows outward, cleansing thought, imagination, and, finally, the body. Bodily purity is a repercussion or echo of the will. Life is impure only when the will is impure.

The mind has three operations: the formation of ideas, judgements and reasoning.

I study philosophy after my dinner, but the dinner is not the cause o my studying philosophy.

The essence of obscenity is the turning of the inner mystery into a jest.

It is the forgetfulness of these principles which as made for the anarchy in thinking in so much of the anemic philosophy of our day.

The physical theory suffers from the same affect as humanism; it attempts to live on its own fat and breathe the very air which it has already exhaled from its scientific lungs.

there has sprung up a disturbing indifference to truth, and a tendency to regard the useful as the true, and the impractical as the false. The man who can make up his mind when proofs are presented to him is looked upon as a bigot, and the man who ignores proofs and the search for truth is looked upon as broadminded and tolerant.

There are two ways of knowing how good God is: one is never to lose Him, and the other is to lose Him and then to find Him.

When experimental psychology limits itself to rats and kittens, squabs and eyelids, philosophy of nature has little opportunity for formation. But when experimental psychology delivers over its findings concerning phenomenal manifestations of the mind, then the philosophy of nature may apply his philosophical principles.

When money is needed, a priest thinks nothing of organizing a door-to-door canvas; but how often does he make a door-to-door canvas for converts?

There are fads ion science, just as there are fads in clothes

What the new morality resolves itself into is this: You are wrong if you do a thing you do not feel like doing; and you are right if you do a thing you feel like doing. Such a morality is based not only on "fastidiousness," but on "facetiousness." The standard of morality then becomes the individual feeling of what is beautiful, instead of the rational estimate of what is right.

In this sublime hour, therefore, He calls all His children to the pulpit of the Cross, and every word He says to them is set down for the purpose of an eternal publication and an undying consolation.

Most sound minds resent flattery, because they see the egotism behind the screen of altruism.

As the "no" of Eve proves that the creature was made by love and is therefore free, so thy Fiat proves that the Creature was made for love as well.