Fulton J. Sheen Quotes - Page 10

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

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

If a man surrenders all power of self-determination in regard to the profits, management or ownership of the place where he works, he not only loses that special prerogative which marks him off from a cow in a pasture, but what is worse, he loses all capacity for determining any work. This is the beginning of a slavery which sometimes goes by the name of security.

Man is incurably curious.

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 beads

Atheism, nine times out of ten, is born from the womb of a bad conscience. Disbelief is born of sin, not of reason.

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

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.

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.

Unless souls are saved, nothing is saved; there can be no world peace without soul peace.

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

The only time laughter is wicked is when it is turned against Him Who gave it.

God could not keep, as it were, the secret of His love, and the telling of it was creation.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

All our anxieties relate to time. The major problems of psychiatry revolve around an analysis of the despair, pessimism, melancholy, and complexes that are the inheritances of what has been or with the fears, anxieties, worries, that are the imaginings of what will be.

The workmen in a factory may have a shadowy, unknown absentee "employer" - the thousands of individual owners of stock - whom "management" represents and tries to please by extra dividends. The workman's livelihood is at the disposition of strangers who make a single demand of their representatives: higher profits.

To love what is below the human is degradation; to love what is human for the sake of the human is mediocrity; to love the human for the sake of the Divine is enriching; to love the Divine for its own sake is sanctity.

Monopolistic capitalism is to blame for this; it sunders the right to own property from responsibility that owning property involves. Those who own only a few stocks have no practical control of any industry. They vote by postcard proxy, but they have rarely even seen "their" company. The two elements which ought to be inextricably joined in any true conception of private property - ownership and responsibility - are separated. Those who own do not manage; those who manage; those who manage and work do not control or own.

The forgiveness of God is one thing, but the proof that we want that forgiveness is the energy we expend to make amends for the wrong.

The slave states of Western world are an outgrowth of monopolistic capitalism - an economic system which is opposed to the wide distribution of private property in many hands. Instead, monopolistic capitalism concentrates productive wealth among a few men, allowing the rest to become a vast proletariat.