Category: Fulton Sheen

The fact is: you want to be perfectly happy, but you are not. Your life has been a series of disappointments, shocks, and disillusionment. How have you reacted to your disappointments? Either you became cynical, or else you became religious.

If a ship is sailing on a polluted canal and wishes to transfer itself to clear waters on a higher level, it must pass through a device that looks out the polluted waters and raises the ship to a higher position. Mary’s immaculate conception was like that lock…{T]through her, humanity passed from the lower level of the sons of Adam to the higher level of the sons of God.

The world is in a state of mortal sin, and it needs absolution. Useless platitudes and ‘regeneration,’ ‘the Constitution’ and ‘progress’ will not save us, even though we shout them louder and louder. We need a new word in our vocabulary, and that word is God.

The better we become, the less conscious we are of our goodness. If anyone admits to being a saint, he is close to being a devil…The more saintly we become, the less conscious we are of being holy. A child is cute as long as he does not know he is cute. As soon as he thinks he is, he is a brat. True goodness is unconscious.

Pride is an admission of weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals.

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

We can think of Lent as a time to eradicate evil or cultivate virtue, a time to pull up weeds, or to plant good seeds. Which is better is clear, for the Christian ideal is always positive rather than negative.

If we wish to have the light, we must keep the sun; if we wish to keep our forests, we must keep our trees; if we wish to keep our perfumes, we must keep our flowers–and if we wish to keep our rights, then we must keep our God.

In every friendship, hearts grow and entwine themselves together so that the two hearts seem to make only one heart with only a common thought. That is why separation is so painful; it is not so much two hearts separating but one being torn asunder.

There is a tendency among many shallow thinkers of our day to teach that every human act is a reflex over which we do not exercise human control. They would rate a generous deed as no more praiseworthy than a wink, a crime as no more voluntary than a sneeze…Such a philosophy undercuts all human dignity…All of us have the power of choice in action at every moment of our lives.