Top 100 Fulton J Sheen Sayings
#1. You have a chance to move in far better society than the Joneses. Why worry about keeping up with the Joneses? Keep up with the Angels and you'll be far wiser and happier.
Fulton J. Sheen
#2. The term science means something quite different for our generation than it did not so many generations ago.
Fulton J. Sheen
#3. Each of us makes his own weather, determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits.
Fulton J. Sheen
#4. What is discovered may be abused, but that does not mean the discovery was evil.
Fulton J. Sheen
#5. The loves of all hearts are so many mirrors revealing their characters.
Fulton J. Sheen
#6. Prayer is helplessness casting itself on Power, infirmity leaning on Strength, misery reaching to Mercy, and a prisoner clamoring for Relief.
Fulton J. Sheen
#7. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#9. Hunger is not just an economic problem. It is a moral and spiritual problem.
Fulton J. Sheen
#10. It is a curious psychological fact that those who make their personal love public, and "dear" one another with saccharine epithets, are very often those who when alone quarrel and fight.
Fulton J. Sheen
#11. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#12. Humility is dependence on God as pride is independence of Him. The humble soul is always the thankful soul.
Fulton J. Sheen
#13. Advertising tries to stimulate our sensuous desires, converting luxuries into necessities, but it only intensifies man's inner misery. The business world is bent on creating hungers which its wares never satisfy, and thus it adds to the frustrations and broken minds of our times.
Fulton J. Sheen
#14. Each of us comes into life with fists closed, set for aggressiveness and acquisition. But when we abandon life our hands are open; there is nothing on earth that we need, nothing the soul can take with it.
Fulton J. Sheen
#15. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#17. Satan stations more devils on monastery walls than in the dens of iniquity, for the latter offer no resistance.
Fulton J. Sheen
#18. Reading from St. John Chrysostom that the life of a bishop should be more perfect than the life of a hermit. The reason he gave was that the holiness which the monk preserves in the desert must be preserved by the bishop into the midst of the evil of the world.
Fulton J. Sheen
#20. Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.
Fulton J. Sheen
#21. The denial of the right of ownership to a man is a denial of his basic freedom: freedom without property is always incomplete. To be "secured" - but with no accompanying responsibility - is to be the slave of whatever group provides the security.
Fulton J. Sheen
#22. Here is the answer to the riddle of love. Love implies relation. If lived in isolation, it becomes selfishness; if absorbed in collectivity, it loses its personality and, therefore, the right to love.
Fulton J. Sheen
#23. When you think of the condition the world is in now you sometimes wish that Noah had missed the boat.
Fulton J. Sheen
#24. I feel it is time that I also pay tribute to my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Fulton J. Sheen
#25. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#26. The true notion is that the material universe is a sign or an indication of what God is. We look at the purity of the snowflake and we see something of the goodness of God. The world is full of poetry: it is sin which turns it into prose.
Fulton J. Sheen
#27. The very fact that a man or a woman seeks a new partner is a proof that there never was any love at all, for though sex is replaceable, love is not.
Fulton J. Sheen
#28. In the circuits of the planets there are times when the heavens are under the earth, and in the ways of God with men there was a time when Heaven was under the earth, and that was when Christ was born in the cave of Bethlehem.
Fulton J. Sheen
#29. Goodness by its nature is lovable and love finds it impossible not to pursue goodness.
Fulton J. Sheen
#30. No one can love himself properly unless he knows why he is living. Love is useless when alone,
Fulton J. Sheen
#31. As a man must be born before he can begin to lead his physical life, so he must be born to lead a Divine Life. That birth occurs in the Sacrament of Baptism. To survive, he must be nourished by Divine Life; that is done in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.
Fulton J. Sheen
#32. Insisted that a speaker must begin his message from where his hearers are, not where he is.
Fulton J. Sheen
#33. Abstraction is the condition of the science of metaphysics, but in no way is its content.
Fulton J. Sheen
#34. Carnal love, despite its seeming intimacy, often can become an exchange of egotisms. The ego is projected onto the other person and what is loved is not the other person, but the pleasure the other person gives.
Fulton J. Sheen
#35. Baloney is flattery laid on so thick it cannot be true, and blarney is flattery so thin we love it.
Fulton J. Sheen
#36. The lover of God never knows the words "too much." Those who accuse others of loving God or religion too much really do not love God at all, nor do they know the meaning of love.
Fulton J. Sheen
#37. Being is the soul of every concept, of every judgment and of every reasoning.
Fulton J. Sheen
#38. A man without God is not like a cake without raisins; he is like a cake without the flour and milk; he lacks the essential ingredients.
Fulton J. Sheen
#39. I study philosophy after my dinner, but the dinner is not the cause o my studying philosophy.
Fulton J. Sheen
#40. Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday.
Fulton J. Sheen
#41. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#42. 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!
Fulton J. Sheen
#43. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#44. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#45. Discussion is also a most excellent means to avoid -decision-
Fulton J. Sheen
#46. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#47. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#48. The wicked fear the good, because the good are a constant reproach to their consciences. The ungodly like religion in the same way that they like lions, either dead or behind bars; they fear religion when it breaks loose and begins to challenge their consciences.
Fulton J. Sheen
#49. As the mother knows the needs better than the babe, so the Blessed Mother understands our cries and worries and knows them better than we know ourselves.
Fulton J. Sheen
#50. Your unhappiness is not due to your want of a fortune or high position or fame or sufficient vitamins. It is due not to a want of something outside of you, but to a want of something inside you. You were made for perfect happiness. No wonder everything short of God disappoints you.
Fulton J. Sheen
#51. All badness is spoiled goodness. A bad apple is a good apple that became rotten. Because evil has no capital of its own, it is a parasite that feeds on goodness.
Fulton J. Sheen
#52. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#53. Our generosity is measured not by what we give but by what we keep.
Fulton J. Sheen
#54. You must remember to love people and use things, rather than to love things and use people.
Fulton J. Sheen
#55. By the mere fact that we do not go forward, we go backward.
Fulton J. Sheen
#57. One becomes more interested in a job of work after the first impulse to drop it has been overcome.
Fulton J. Sheen
#58. Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.
Fulton J. Sheen
#59. To see a priest making his meditation before Mass does more for an altar boy's vocation than a thousand pieces of inspirational literature.
Fulton J. Sheen
#60. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#61. 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 do
Fulton J. Sheen
#62. Most sound minds resent flattery, because they see the egotism behind the screen of altruism.
Fulton J. Sheen
#63. We suffer from hunger of the spirit while much of the world is suffering from hunger of the body.
Fulton J. Sheen
#64. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#65. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#66. Help someone in distress and you lighten your own burden; the very joy of alleviating the sorrow of another is the lessening of one's own.
Fulton J. Sheen
#67. The conclusion is that the physical theory and the mathematical theory of science are valid methods but not valid philosophies. Facts need interpretation the physical theory forgets that it has no such principles of interpretation with its own bosom.
Fulton J. Sheen
#68. It is not particularly difficult to find thousands who will spend two or three hours a day in exercising, but if you ask them to bend their knees to God in five minutes of prayer they protest that it is too long.
Fulton J. Sheen
#69. Atheism, nine times out of ten, is born from the womb of a bad conscience. Disbelief is born of sin, not of reason.
Fulton J. Sheen
#70. The proud man counts his newspaper clippings, the humble man his blessings.
Fulton J. Sheen
#71. Education lays hold of what is best in a person, but character lays hold of what is worse. It takes hold of a failing and by very skillful manipulation and training turns it into a perfection.
Fulton J. Sheen
#72. Grace does not work like a penny in a slot machine. Grace will move you only when you want it to move you, and only when you let it move you. The supernatural order supposes the freedom of the natural order, but it does not destroy it.
Fulton J. Sheen
#73. The Church was spread throughout the entire Roman Empire before a single book of the New Testament was written.
Fulton J. Sheen
#74. There are no planes in the spiritual life; we are either going uphill or coming down.
Fulton J. Sheen
#75. Most of us do not like to look inside ourselves for the same reason we don't like to open a letter that has bad news.
Fulton J. Sheen
#76. The soul cannot be seen in a biological laboratory, any more than pain can be seen on an operating table.
Fulton J. Sheen
#77. So the divine love is sacrificial love. Love does not mean to have and to own and to possess. It means to be had and to be owned and to be possessed. It is not a circle circumscribed by self, it is arms outstretched to embrace all humanity within its grasp.
Fulton J. Sheen
#78. The Rosary is the best therapy for these distraught, unhappy, fearful, and frustrated souls, precisely because it involves the simultaneous use of three powers: the physical, the vocal, and the spiritual, and in that order.
Fulton J. Sheen
#79. Why is anyone lovable - if it be not that God put His love into each of us?
Fulton J. Sheen
#80. This is what Aristotle meant when he said that the object of science is the necessary and the universal; man and not this man.
Fulton J. Sheen
#81. Before the sin, Satan assures us that it is of no consequence; after the sin, he persuades us that it is unforgivable.
Fulton J. Sheen
#83. Confiscation in any form is an unhealthy solution for a real disease. It amounts to telling men that because they are economically crippled, they must abandon all efforts to get well and allow the state to provide them with free wheelchairs.
Fulton J. Sheen
#84. Solitude can be very rewarding and full of blessing because in the silence of the inner being, one finds God
Fulton J. Sheen
#85. The melody of her life is played just as it was written. Mary was thought, conceived, and planned as the equal sign between ideal and history, thought and reality, hope and realization.
Fulton J. Sheen
#86. A deep spiritual bond exists between Christians, Moslems and Jews, for as Pope Pius XII said, all Christians are "spiritual Semites" because we are descended spiritually from Abraham.
Fulton J. Sheen
#87. When the will loves anything that is below it in dignity, it degrades itself.
Fulton J. Sheen
#88. The more He loved those for whom He was the ransom, the more His anguish would increase, as it is the faults of friends rather than enemies which most disturb hearts!
Fulton J. Sheen
#89. A love without satiety an ecstasy without an end, a surrender to the beloved - God - without ever falling back on egotistic loneliness. Marriage and celibacy are not contraries
Fulton J. Sheen
#90. A person is merciful when he feels the sorrow and misery of another as if it were his own.
Fulton J. Sheen
#91. Souls generally do not fall away from Christ because of the Creed; they first have difficulty with the Commandments.
Fulton J. Sheen
#92. The essence of obscenity is the turning of the inner mystery into a jest.
Fulton J. Sheen
#93. Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them.
Fulton J. Sheen
#94. 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.
Fulton J. Sheen
#95. How can one love self without being selfish? How can one love others without losing self? The answer is: By loving both self and neighbor in God. It is His Love that makes us love both self and neighbor rightly.
Fulton J. Sheen
#96. The modern man, finding that Humanism and Sex both fail to satisfy, seeks his happiness in Science ... But Science fails too, for it is something more than a knowledge of matter the soul craves.
Fulton J. Sheen
#97. The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.
Fulton J. Sheen
#98. relinquish the desire for children and wealth and live the life of 'Vanaprastha,' that is, one retired from the household cares.
Fulton J. Sheen
#99. The difference between the love of a man and the love of a woman is that a man will always give reasons for loving, but a woman gives no reasons for loving.
Fulton J. Sheen
#100. If we use our lives for other purposes than those given by God, not only do we miss happiness, but we actually hurt ourselves and beget in us queer little "kinks".
Fulton J. Sheen
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