Fulton J. Sheen

Judge the Catholic Church not by those who barely live by its spirit, but by the example of those who live closest to it.

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

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.

Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything.

Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.

Christianity, unlike any other religion in the world, begins with catastrophe and defeat. Sunshine religions and psychological inspirations collapse in calamity and wither in adversity. But the Life of the Founder of Christianity, having begun with the Cross, ends with the empty tomb and victory.

Never measure your generosity by what you give, but rather by what you have left.

Ever since the days of Adam, man has been hiding from God and saying, 'God is hard to find.

A man may stand for the justice of God, but a woman stands for His Mercy.

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

All badness is spoiled goodness. A bad apple is a good apple that became rotten. Because evil has no capital of its own, it is a parasite that feeds on goodness.

Charity is to be measured, not by what one has given away, but by what one has left.

Leisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery, or a waterfall.

Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.

There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.

Prayer begins by talking to God, but it ends by listening to Him. In the face of Absolute Truth, silence is the soul's language.

Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.

Baloney is flattery laid on so thick it cannot be true, and blarney is flattery so thin we love it.

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.

The way not to lead a monotonous life is to live for others.