Fulton J. Sheen

“When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.”

“The higher the love, the more demands will be made on us to conform to that ideal.”

“As our Lord said, "Where your treasure is, there is your heart also." Hence the least love of God is worth more than the knowledge of all created things.”

“We become like that which we love. If we love what is base, we become base; but if we love what is noble, we become noble.”

“When the will loves anything that is below it in dignity, it degrades itself.”

“It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.”

“A teacher who cannot explain any abstract subject to a child does not himself thoroughly understand his subject; if he does not attempt to break down his knowledge to fit the child's mind, he does not understand teaching.”

“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.”

“Communism is an aggressive religion of the species.”

“When a child is given to his parents, a crown is made for that child in Heaven, and woe to the parents who raise a child without consciousness of that eternal crown!”

“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.”

“But there was no room at the inn"; the inn is the gathering place of public opinion; so often public opinion locks its doors to the King.”

“What is discovered may be abused, but that does not mean the discovery was evil.”

“The science of a religious man must be scientific; the religion of a scientific man must be religious.”

“Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle. All sciences are differentiated by their abstraction.”

“Nothing ever happens in the world that does not happen first inside human hearts.”

“Wars come from egotism and selfishness. Every macrocosmic or world war has its origin in microcosmic wars going on inside millions and millions of individuals.”

“In the eleven months preceding the outbreak of World War II, 211 treaties of peace were signed. Were these treaties of peace written on paper, or were they written on the hearts of men? And we must ask ourselves as we hear of treaties being written today, whether the treaties of the UN are written with the full cognizance of the fact that those who sign them are responsible before God?”

“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.”

“We must go out to Pure Life, Pure Truth, Pure Love, and that is the definition of God. He is the ultimate goal of life; from Him we came, and in Him alone do we find our peace.”

“Man is incurably curious.”

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

“Some change their philosophy of life with every book they read: one book sells them on Freud, the next on Marx; materialists one year, idealists the next; cynics for another period, and Eberals for still another. They have their quivers full of arrows but no fixed target. As no game makes the hunter tired of the sport, so the want of destiny makes the mind bored with life.”

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

“Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.”

“Head knowledge is worthless, unless accompanied by submission of the will and right action.”

“The mark of man is initiative, but the mark of woman is cooperation. Man talks about freedom; woman about sympathy, love, sacrifice. Man cooperates with nature; woman cooperates with God. Man was called to till the earth, to "rule over the earth"; woman to be the bearer of a life that comes from God.”

“Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them.”

“Far better it is for you to say: "I am a sinner," than to say: "I have no need of religion." The empty can be filled, but the self-intoxicated have no room for God.”

“Once you have surrendered yourself, you make yourself receptive. In receiving from God, you are perfected and completed.”

“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!”

“It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished.”

“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.”

“Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.”

“Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.”

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

“Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.”

“Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything.”

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

“If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.”

“Never forget that there are only two philosophies to rule your life: the one of the cross, which starts with the fast and ends with the feast. The other of Satan, which starts with the feast and ends with the headache.”

“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.”

“Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.”

“You must remember to love people and use things, rather than to love things and use people.”

“Science is not wisdom.”

“Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.”

“Patience is power.Patience is not an absence of action;rather it is "timing"it waits on the right time to act,for the right principlesand in the right way.”

“There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.”

“To tell a woman who is forty, "You look like sixteen," is boloney. The blarney way of saying it is "Tell me how old you are, I should like to know at what age women are the most beautiful.”

“Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.”