Sheed Quotes

#1. There is no external operation of the divine nature which is the work of one Person as distinct from the Others.

Frank Sheed

#2. The man who knows of the universe of spirit walks upright, the materialist hugs the earth.

Frank Sheed

#3. The theologian can ask far profounder questions because he knows more about God; by that same knowledge he knows that there are depths that he will never know. But to see why one cannot know more is itself a real seeing; there is a way of seeing the darkness which is a kind of light.

Frank Sheed

#4. Sanity, remember, does not mean living in the same world as everyone else; it means living in the real world.

Frank Sheed

#5. One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.

Wilfrid Sheed

#6. I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.

Wilfrid Sheed

#7. Beware the fictionist writing his own life. Even candor becomes a strategy.

Wilfrid Sheed

#8. Sin, for instance, is an effort to gain something against the will of God; but the will of God is all that holds us in existence;

Frank Sheed

#9. Even the God of Calvin never judged anyone as harshly as married couples judge each other.

Wilfrid Sheed

#10. All theology consists in finding out what is meant by the words "He is." Let us begin.

Frank Sheed

#11. We can never attain a maximum love of God with only a minimum knowledge of God

Frank Sheed

#12. Whether or not Big Brother is watching us, we certainly have to watch him, which may be even worse.

Wilfrid Sheed

#13. The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.

Wilfrid Sheed

#14. But the plain truth about most of us is that we have let our intellects sink into a condition in which they have neither the muscles nor the energy nor the right habits for the job, nor any effective inclination towards it. We must see how they may be made fit.

Frank Sheed

#15. For Catholics before Vatican II, the land of the free was pre-eminently the land of Sister Says-except, of course, for Sister, for whom it was the land of Father Says.

Wilfrid Sheed

#16. If the French were really intelligent, they'd speak English.

Wilfrid Sheed

#17. A Mystery in short is an invitation to the mind. For it means that there is an inexhaustible well of Truth from which the mind may drink and drink again in the certainty that the well will never run dry, that there will always be water for the mind's thirst.

Frank Sheed

#18. The actual Irish weather report is really a recording made in 1922, which no one has had occasion to change. "Scattered showers, periods of sunshine."

Wilfrid Sheed

#19. Suicide is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.

Wilfrid Sheed

#20. One way to prevent conversation from being boring is to say the wrong thing.

Francis Joseph Sheed

#21. The only reason I didn't kill myself after I read the reviews of my first book was because we have two rivers in New York and I couldn't decide which one to jumo into.

Wilfrid Sheed

#22. As you approach the presidency, no one seems worthy of it, since it wasn't designed for a human in the first place.

Wilfrid Sheed

#23. Unnecessary customs live a brutally short life in America.

Wilfrid Sheed

#24. I've won every debate I've had with an atheist, and never converted even a single one.

Francis Joseph Sheed

#25. How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late.

Wilfrid Sheed

#26. The American male doesn't mature until he has exhausted all other possibilities.

Wilfrid Sheed

#27. A mental habit has been annihilated, but at least the way towards a sounder mental habit is clear. For although we are made of nothing, we are made into something; and since WHAT WE ARE MADE OF does not account for us, we are forced to a more intense concentration upon THE GOD WE ARE MADE BY.

Frank Sheed

#28. Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying "Arise, sir Knight" deserves a life sentence in Camelot.

Wilfrid Sheed

#29. Saloons provide moments of genuine ecstasy - but only if your soul is at peace and the rest of your life bears contemplating. Otherwise, they are palaces of misery.

Wilfrid Sheed

#30. To say that one sees the answer clearly would be to say that the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity is no mystery at all. We know that the Three Persons are not each other: we know that each is infinite and wholly God.

Frank Sheed

#31. Eternity is not time at all. It is God's total possession of Himself.

Frank Sheed

#32. Man is a rational animal. But that does not mean that he is a reasonable animal. It means only that he has reason, and therefore can misuse it. If he had not reason, he could not be unreasonable. But he has, and is.

Frank Sheed

#33. Just as space has parts lying alongside one another, time has parts following one another. The Infinite has no parts, of either (or any other conceivable) sort. Eternity is not time, however much we may try to glorify the concept of time.

Frank Sheed

#34. Now when a man is as right as that in his forecasts, there is some reason to think he may be right in his premises.

Frank Sheed

#35. Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their final test.

Wilfrid Sheed

#36. People talk about talent as though it were some neutral substance that can be applied to anything. But talent is narrow and only functions with a very few subjects, which it is up to the writer to find.

Wilfrid Sheed

#37. Here the dialogue form breaks down. From the believer's mouth there emerges what can only be called a soup of words, sentences that begin and do not end, words that change into something else halfway. This goes on for a longer or shorter time.

Frank Sheed

#38. Mr Michener, as timeless as a stack of National Geographics, is the ultimate Summer Writer. Just as one goes back to the cottage in Maine, so one goes back to one's Michener.

Wilfrid Sheed

#39. Every writer is a writer of the generation before.

Wilfrid Sheed

#40. As things now stand, the office is a slightly meaner battleground than the home. Male bosses seem to dominate their women underlings as they would never dominate their wives.

Wilfrid Sheed

#41. The 1930s - a Golden Age for American humor, mainly because everything else was going so badly. The wisecrack was the basic American sentence because there were so many things that could not be said any other way.

Wilfrid Sheed