Fulton J. Sheen
Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.Collection: Jealousy
Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.Collection: Love
Show me your hands. Do they have scars from giving? Show me your feet. Are they wounded in service? Show me your heart. Have you left a place for divine love?Collection: Inspirational
Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.Collection: Death
Pride is an admission of weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals.
The proud man counts his newspaper clippings, the humble man his blessings.
Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.
I feel it is time that I also pay tribute to my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Baloney is flattery laid on so thick it cannot be true, and blarney is flattery so thin we love it.
The big print giveth, and the fine print taketh away.
The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.Collection: Honesty
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.Collection: Majority Vote
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.Collection: Hate
Prayer begins by talking to God, but it ends by listening to Him. In the face of Absolute Truth, silence is the soul's language.Collection: Prayer
America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance - it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.Collection: Country
God does not love us because we are valuable. We are valuable because God loves us.Collection: Godly
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.Collection: Women
Civilization is always in danger when those who have never learned to obey are given the right to command.Collection: Civilization
If you do not live what you believe, you will end up believing what you live.Collection: Believe
Freedom does not mean that right to do whatever we please, but rather to do as we ought. The right to do whatever we please reduces freedom to a physical power and forgets that freedom is a moral power.Collection: Freedom
If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself. You have a duty to worship God, not because He will be imperfect and unhappy if you do not, but because you will be imperfect and unhappy.Collection: God
It's impossible to lose your footing when you're on your knees.Collection: Knees
The humble, simple souls, who are little enough to see the bigness of God in the littleness of a Babe, are therefore the only ones who will ever understand the reason of His visitation. He came to this poor earth of ours to carry on an exchange; to say to us, as only the Good God could say: 'you give me your humanity, and I will give you my Divinity; you give me your time, and I will give you My eternity; you give me your broken heart, and I will give you Love; you give me your nothingness, and I will give you My all.Collection: Love You
All worry is atheism, because it is a want of trust in God.Collection: Worry
Live each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance toward the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point. So climb slowly, enjoying each passing moment; and then the view from the summit will serve a more rewarding climax for your journey.Collection: Life
Before the sin, Satan assures us that it is of no consequence; after the sin, he persuades us that it is unforgivable.Collection: Sin
There is no word more "dangerous" than liberalism, because to oppose it is the new "unforgivable sin."Collection: Unforgivable Sin
Pride is the king of vices...it is the first of the pallbearers of the soul...other vices destroy only their opposite virtues, as wantonness destroys chastity; greed destroys temperance; anger destroys gentleness; but pride destroys all virtues.Collection: Kings
It is easy to find truth, though it is hard to face it, and harder still to follow it.Collection: Faces
Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them.Collection: Inspirational
Many souls fail to find God because they want a religion which will remake society without remaking themselves.Collection: Soul
Our happiest times are those in which we forget ourselves, usually in being kind to someone else. That tiny moment of self-abdication is an act of true humility: the man who loses himself finds himself and finds his happiness.Collection: Humility
In every friendship hearts grow and entwine themselves together, so that the two hearts seem to make only one heart with only a common thought. That is why separation is so painful; it is not so much two hearts separating, but one being torn asunder.Collection: Inspiring
Today (1950), the hatred of the Moslem countries against the West is becoming hatred against Christianity itself. Although the statesmen have not yet taken it into account, there is still grave danger that the temporal power of Islam may return and, with it, the menace that it may shake off a West which has ceased to be Christian, and affirm itself as a great anti-Christian world Power.Collection: Christian
Joy is not the same as pleasure or happiness. A wicked and evil man may have pleasure, while any ordinary mortal is capable of being happy. Pleasure generally comes from things, and always through the senses; happiness comes from humans through fellowship. Joy comes from loving God and neighbor. Pleasure is quick and violent, like a flash of lightning. Joy is steady and abiding, like a fixed star. Pleasure depends on external circumstances, such as money, food, travel, etc. Joy is independent of them, for it comes from a good conscience and love of God.Collection: Stars
There are 200 million poor in the world who would gladly take the vow of poverty if they could eat, dress and have a home like I doCollection: Home
The science of a religious man must be scientific; the religion of a scientific man must be religious.Collection: Religious
The mark of the Christian is the willingness to look for the Divine in the flesh of a babe in a crib, the continuing Christ under the appearance of bread on an altar, and a meditation and a prayer on a string of beadsCollection: Christian
If we had intellectual vigour enough to ascend from effects to causes, we would explain political, economical and social phenomena less by credit sheets, balance of trade and reparations than by our attitude towards God.Collection: Attitude
Man is incurably curious.Collection: Men
Our personal dispositions are as windowpanes through which we see the world either as rosy or dull. The way we color the glasses we wear is the way the world seems to us.Collection: Attitude
Unless souls are saved, nothing is saved; there can be no world peace without soul peace.Collection: Faith
Atheism, nine times out of ten, is born from the womb of a bad conscience. Disbelief is born of sin, not of reason.Collection: Sins Not
It is the basic principle of Marxism that any attempt to reconcile capital and labor so that they both co-operate in peace and prosperity is a betrayal of communism.Collection: Wisdom
The only time laughter is wicked is when it is turned against Him Who gave it.Collection: Laughter
Communism is an aggressive religion of the species.Collection: Communism
God could not keep, as it were, the secret of His love, and the telling of it was creation.Collection: Faith
It is a long established principle of the Church never to completely drop from her public worship any ceremony, object or prayer which once occupied a place in that worship.Collection: Prayer
If all things in this universe exist, it is because they participate in the Being of God, if there are some things with life, it is because they are reflections of the life of God; if there are beings endowed with intellect and will - like men and angels - it's because they are a participation of the Sovereign Intellect which is God.Collection: Angel
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.Collection: Self