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?
Fulton J. SheenRead
The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.
Interpretation
Indecision on moral issues equates to supporting evil, reflecting a crisis of conviction in honesty versus dishonesty.
Fulton J. Sheen's quote highlights the moral obligation individuals have to take a stand on significant issues. It suggests that failing to do so is, in itself, a choice that tacitly supports evil. The quote further contrasts the passionate beliefs of those who embrace dishonesty with the often lukewarm commitment of those who value honesty, illustrating a troubling imbalance in conviction in contemporary society.
In practice
Using this quote in a debate about the importance of taking stands on social justice issues.
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?
A woman gets angry when a man denies his faults, because she knew them all along. His lying mocks her affection; it is the deceit that angers her more than the faults.
Many married women who have deliberately spurned the "hour" of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving themselves, they lost themselves!
No one has ever laughed at a pun who did not see in the one word a twofold meaning. To materialists this world is opaque like a curtain; nothing can be seen through it. A mountain is just a mountain, a sunset just a sunset; but to poets, artists, and saints, the world is transparent like a window pane - it tells of something beyond....a mountain tells of the Power of God, the sunset of His Beauty, and the snowflake of His Purity.
The big print giveth, and the fine print taketh away.
Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.
The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope.
The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members
This life is not man's own show; if he becomes personally and emotionally involved in the very complicated cosmic drama, he reaps inevitable suffering for having distorted the divine 'plot.'
To know God as the sovereign disposer of all good, inviting us to present our requests, and yet not to approach or ask of him, were so far from availing us, that it were just as if one told of a treasure were to allow it to remain buried in the ground.
Freedom and slavery are mental states.
There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me
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