Quotes from Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

Here is the answer, after all these years, to the mysterious words in the Gospel of the Incarnation which stated that Our Blessed Mother laid her "firstborn" in the manger. Did that mean that Our Blessed Mother was to have other children? It certainly did, but not according to the flesh. Our Divine Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was the unique Son of Our Blessed Mother by the flesh. But Our Lady was to have other children, not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit!

There were only two classes of people who heard the cry Christmas night: shepherds and wise men. Shepherds: those who know they know nothing. Wise men: those who know they do not know everything. Only the very simple and very learned discovered God - never the man with one book.

All round about us, in our parishes, in our daily contacts with men, are countless masses of souls that are like gold ingots covered with dross. And we, if we but had the fire of the Spirit, would burnish them into jewels of the Kingdom of God!

But this humiliation which began in Bethlehem when He was conceived in the Virgin Mary was only the first of many to counteract the pride of man, until the final humiliation of death on the Cross.

Sacrifice without love is pain. Pain with love is sacrifice. Pain without love is misery. Love without pain is heaven. Love with pain is purgatory. Pain without love is hell.

Evil is revealed when there is seen what it does to one who is loved.

Libido, or concupiscence, a tending toward certain things in defiance of rational restraint.

God can do something with those who see what they really are and who know their need of cleansing but can do nothing with the man who feels himself worthy.

A deep spiritual bond exists between Christians, Moslems and Jews, for as Pope Pius XII said, all Christians are "spiritual Semites" because we are descended spiritually from Abraham.

The Old Testament begins with the Genesis of heaven and earth through God making all things. The New Testament had another kind of Genesis, in the sense that it describes the making of all things new.

Deferred joys purchased by sacrifice are always sweetest and most enduring.

People are turning away from Christianity today not because it is too hard but because it is too soft.