Fulton J. Sheen

Any book which inspires us to lead a better life is a good book.

Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.

The science of a religious man must be scientific the religion of a scientific man must be religious.

Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle. All sciences are differentiated by their abstraction.

Man wants three things; life, knowledge, and love.

A teacher who cannot explain any abstract subject to a child does not himself thoroughly understand his subject; if he does not attempt to break down his knowledge to fit the child's mind, he does not understand teaching.

The wicked fear the good, because the good are a constant reproach to their consciences. The ungodly like religion in the same way that they like lions, either dead or behind bars; they fear religion when it breaks loose and begins to challenge their consciences.

Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday.

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

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?

It is easier to write a book with footnotes than the same book written so that children can understand it.

To deny the necessity or value of metaphysics is to assert a metaphysical principle, just as to say a religion must be without dogmas is to assert a dogma.

Each of us makes his own weather determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits.

No man hates God without first hating himself.

God has given different gifts for different people. There is no basis for feeling inferior to another who has a different gift. Once it is realised that we shall be judged by the gift we have received, rather than the gift we have not, one is completely delivered from a false sense of inferiority.

Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.

Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil _ a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons _ never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error _ Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratory. Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability.

Love of God thus becomes the dominant passion of life; like every other worth-while love, it demands and inspires sacrifice. But love of God and man, as an ideal, has lately been replaced by the new ideal of tolerance which inspires no sacrifice. Why should any human being in the world be merely tolerated? What man has ever made a sacrifice in the name of tolerance? It leads men, instead, to express their own egotism in a book or a lecture that patronizes the downtrodden group. One of the cruelest things that can happen to a human being is to be tolerated. Never once did Our Lord say, __olerate your enemies!_ But He did say, __ove your enemies; do good to them that hate you_ (Matt. 5:44). Such love can be achieved only if we deliberately curb our fallen nature__ animosities.