Fulton J. Sheen Quotes - Page 6

Every moment comes to you pregnant with divine purpose . . . . Once it leaves your hands and your power to do with it as you please, it plunges into eternity, to remain forever what you made it.

Lenten practices of giving up pleasures are good reminders that the purpose of life is not pleasure. The purpose of life is to attain to perfect life, all truth and undying ecstatic love - which is the definition of God. In pursuing that goal we find happiness. Pleasure is not the purpose of anything; pleasure is a by-product resulting from doing something that is good. One of the best ways to get happiness and pleasure out of life is to ask ourselves, 'How can I please God?' and, 'Why am I not better?' It is the pleasure-seeker who is bored, for all pleasures diminish with repetition.

Counsel involving right and wrong should never be sought from a man who does not say his prayers.

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

To fall in love means to fall into something... And that something is responsibility.

I feel it is time that I also pay tribute to my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Each and every one of us, at the end of the journey of life, will come face to face with either one or the other of two faces... And one of them, either the merciful face of Christ or the miserable face of Satan, will say, "Mine, mine." May we be Christ's!

Souls generally do not fall away from Christ because of the Creed; they first have difficulty with the Commandments.

A person is great, not by the ferocity of his hatred of evil, but by the intensity of his love for God.

To see a priest making his meditation before Mass does more for an altar boy's vocation than a thousand pieces of inspirational literature.

The nearer Christ comes to a heart, the more it becomes conscious of its guilt; it will then either ask for his mercy and find peace, or else it will turn against Him because it is not yet ready to give up its sinfulness. Thus He will separate the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff. Man's reaction to this Divine Presence will be the test: either it will call out all the opposition of egotistic natures, or else galvanize them into a regeneration and a resurrection.

The world may disagree with the Church, but the world knows very definitely with what it is disagreeing. In the future as in the past, the Church will be intolerant about the sanctity of marriage, for what God has joined together no man shall put asunder; she will be intolerant about her creed, and be ready to die for it, for she fears not those who kill the body, but rather those who have the power to cast body and soul into hell.

Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man. The industrial civilization of the Western world has no intent to destroy man's freedom or to deny his personality. But Communism does. Denying God, it reduces man to a robot.

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?

Freedom is not just something with which we are born; it is something we achieve. America did not receive a perpetual endowment of freedom; it has had to struggle and fight to preserve it. Freedom is not an heirloom or an antique; it is a life that must fight against the corrosive powers of death and nourish itself on the daily bread of goodness and virtue.

There is more grace per square foot in San Francisco than any place on earth.

At Cana, [Mary] gave Him as a Savior to sinners; on the Cross He gave her as a refuge to sinners.

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.

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.

All love craves unity. As the highest peak of love in the human order is the unity of husband and wife in the flesh, so the highest unity in the Divine order is the unity of the soul and Christ in communion.

The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.

We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

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

Fasting detaches you from this world. Prayer reattaches you to the next world.

Every child should have an occasional pat on the back as long as it is applied low enough and hard enough.