Category: Fulton Sheen

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

Two classes of people make up the world: those who have found God, and those who are looking for Him–thirsting, hungering, seeking! And the great sinners came closer to Him thean the proud intellectuals! Pride swells and inflates the ego; gross sinners are depressed, defalted, and empty. They, therefore, have room for God. God prefesrs a loving sinner to a loveless ‘saint’. Love can be trained, pride cannot. The man who thinks that he knows will rarely find truth; the man who knows he is a miserable, unhappy sinner, like the woman at the well, is closer to peace, joy and salvation than he knows.

You cannot always depend on prayers to be answered the way you want them answered but you can always depend on God. God, the loving Father often denies us those things which in the end would prove harmful to us. Every boy wants a revolver at age four, and no father yet has ever granted that request. Why should we think God is less wise? Someday we will thank God not only for what He gave us, but also for that which He refused.

Head knowledge is worthless, unless accompanied by submission of the will and right action.

Love is the key to the mystery. Love by its very nature is not selfish, but generous. It seeks not its own, but the good of others. The measure of love is not the pleasure it gives–that is the way the world judges it–but the joy and peace it can purchase for others.

Why is it that any time we speak of temptation we always speak of temptation as something that inclines us to wrong. we have more temptations to become good than we do to become bad.

Love burdens itself with the wants and woes and losses and even the wrongs of others.

In all other religions, one has to be good to come to God–in Christianity one does not. Christianity might be described as a “come as you are” party. It bids us stop worrying about ourselves, stop concentrating on our faults and our failings, and thrust them upon the Savior with a firm resolve of amendment.

The Christian should knows it need Divine Help and therefore turns to Him Who loved us even while we were yet sinners. Examination of conscience, instead of inducing morbidity, thereby becomes an occasion of joy. There are two ways of knowing how good and loving God is. One is by never losing Him, through the preservation of innocence, and the other is by finding Him after one has lost Him. Repentance is not self-regarding, but God-regarding. It is not self-loathing, but God-loving. Christianity bids us accept ourselves as we really are, with all our faults and our failings and our sins.

Because God is full of life, I imagine each morning Almighty God says to the sun, “Do it again;” and every evening to the moon and stars, “Do it again’” and every springtime to the daisies, “Do it again;” and every time a child is born into the world asking for curtain call, that the heart of the God might once more ring out in the heart of the babe.