Quotes from Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

One cannot tell when grace is coming or how it will work on the soul; whether it will come as a result of a disgust with sin.

Our Lord never spoke of His Heavenly, or Risen Glory without bringing in the ignominy of the Cross.

Our Lord has a double view of us: the way He intended us to be and the way we corresponded to His grace.

It will not start with the order in the universe alluding to the existence of a Creator of the cosmos; it will start with the disorder inside of man himself.

It takes eternity to make a man despair.

The celibate is bound to feel lonely in that atmosphere, but it is a different kind of loneliness that plagues the erotic. The former is tempted because, in the natural order, he is without a partner; the other is lonely even when he has his partner, for as St. Augustine reflected: "Our hearts were made for Thee, O Lord, and they cannot rest until they rest in Thee.

Close to the Cross was the only Apostle present, John, whose face was like a cast moulded out of love; Magdalen was there too, like a broken flower, a wounded thing. But foremost among all-God pity her!-was His own mother. Mary, Magdalen, John; innocence, penitence, and priesthood; the three types of souls forever to be found beneath the Cross of Christ.

A love without satiety an ecstasy without an end, a surrender to the beloved— God—without ever falling back on egotistic loneliness. Marriage and celibacy are not contraries

He seeks us before we dream of seeking him; he knocks before we invite him in; he loves us before we respond.

God alone causes faith in the believer. Faith is not the acceptance of abstract ideas. It is so often said, 'Oh, by faith you have to accept a number of dogmas.' No! Faith is participation in the life of God. In faith two persons meet. God and ourselves.

Shakespeare himself spoke of Heaven using wars as a punishment for perversities, lusts and passive barbarianism: If that the heavens do not their visible spirits Send quickly down to calm these vile offenses, It will come Humanity must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep.

The depth of a priest's compassion is the measure of his apostolic success.