Fulton John Sheen (born Peter John Sheen, May 8, 1895 – December 9, 1979) was an American bishop of the Catholic Church known for his preaching and especially his work on television and radio. Ordained a priest of the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, in 1919, Sheen quickly became a renowned theologian, earning the Cardinal Mercier Prize for International Philosophy in 1923. He went on to teach theology and philosophy at the Catholic University of America and served as a parish priest before he was appointed auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of New York in 1951. He held this position until 1966 when he was made the Bishop of Rochester. He resigned in 1969 as his 75th birthday approached, and was made archbishop of the titular see of Newport, Wales.
Fulton Sheen, a renowned Catholic figure, captivated audiences for decades with his radio and TV preaching programs like “The Catholic Hour” and “Life Is Worth Living.” He even earned Emmy Awards and a Time magazine cover. On the path to sainthood, he was declared Venerable in 2012, but his 2019 beatification was postponed due to concerns about his handling of a past sexual misconduct case. The case has been examined and Sheen is defended by his diocese, but the delay underscores the complexities of sainthood processes.
Fulton J. Sheen Quotes
1. “Patience is power. Patience is not an absence of action; rather it is “timing” it waits on the right time to act, for the right principles and in the right way.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
2. “You must remember to love people and use things, rather than to love things and use people.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
3. “Humility is dependence on God as pride is independence of Him. The humble soul is always the thankful soul.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
4. “If you do not live what you believe, you will end up believing what you live.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
5. “Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
6. “Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
7. “Each of us makes his own weather, determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
8. “Evil may have its hour, but God will have His day.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
9. “Believe the incredible and you can do the impossible.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
10. “Fasting detaches you from this world. Prayer reattaches you to the next world.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
11. “Never measure your generosity by what you give, but rather by what you have left.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
12. “Freedom does not mean that right to do whatever we please, but rather to do as we ought. The right to do whatever we please reduces freedom to a physical power and forgets that freedom is a moral power.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
13. “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.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
14. “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.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
15. “Obedience to Truth is obedience to Love.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
16. “Temptation is not a sin but playing with temptation invites sin.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
17. “The power of the rosary is beyond description.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
18. “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. Sheen
19. “The greatest love story of all time is contained in a tiny white Host.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
20. “Before the sin, Satan assures us that it is of no consequence; after the sin, he persuades us that it is unforgivable.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
21. “Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
22. “God does not love us because we are valuable. We are valuable because God loves us.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
23. “Civilization is always in danger when those who have never learned to obey are given the right to command.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
24. “It is easy to find truth, though it is hard to face it, and harder still to follow it.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
25. “How could science be an enemy of religion when God commanded man to be a scientist the day He told him to rule the earth and subject it?”
— Fulton J. Sheen
26. “Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
27. “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.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
28. “Judge the Catholic Church not by those who barely live by its spirit, but by the example of those who live closest to it.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
29. “Other people are like a mirror which reflects back on us the kind of image we cast.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
30. “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.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
31. “A man without God is not like a cake without raisins; he is like a cake without the flour and milk; he lacks the essential ingredients.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
32. “All badness is spoiled goodness. A bad apple is a good apple that becomes rotten. Because evil has no capital of its own, it is a parasite that feeds on goodness.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
33. “There is no word more “dangerous” than liberalism because to oppose it is the new “unforgivable sin.””
— Fulton J. Sheen
34. “If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
35. “Love was meant to be also a sign, a symbol, a messenger, a telltale of the Divine. Love is a messenger from God saying that every human affection and every ecstasy of love are sparks from the great flame of love that is God.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
36. “The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
37. “Unless souls are saved, nothing is saved; there can be no world peace without soul peace.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
38. “The reason we’re bored is because we don’t love anything.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
39. “The Rosary is the best therapy for these distraught, unhappy, fearful, and frustrated souls, precisely because it involves the simultaneous use of three powers: the physical, the vocal, and the spiritual, and in that order.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
40. “Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
41. “The simple shepherds heard the voice of an angel and found their Lamb; the wise men saw the light of a star and found their Wisdom.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
42. “It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God, people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
43. “Help someone in distress and you lighten your own burden; the very joy of alleviating the sorrow of another is the lessening of one’s own.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
44. “All worry is atheism because it is a want of trust in God.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
45. “The denial of the right of ownership to a man is a denial of his basic freedom: freedom without property is always incomplete. To be “secured” – but with no accompanying responsibility – is to be the slave of whatever group provides the security.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
46. “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.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
47. “As long as the decent people refuse to believe that morality must manifest itself in every sphere of human activity, including the political, they will not meet the challenge of Marxism.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
48. “We become like that which we love. If we love what is base, we become base; but if we love what is noble, we become noble.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
49. “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.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
50. “It’s impossible to lose your footing when you’re on your knees.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
51. “The difference between the love of a man and the love of a woman is that a man will always give reasons for loving, but a woman gives no reasons for loving.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
52. “When we die to something, something comes alive within us. If we die to self, charity comes alive; if we die to pride, service comes alive; if we die to lust, reverence for personality comes alive; if we die to anger, love comes alive.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
53. “Pride is an admission of weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
54. “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.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
55. “A Catholic may sin and sin as badly as anyone else, but no genuine Catholic ever denies he is a sinner. A Catholic wants his sins forgiven – not excused or sublimated.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
56. “Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
57. “If you do not live out your faith enthusiastically, maybe you don’t have any faith.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
58. “If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself. You have a duty to worship God, not because He will be imperfect and unhappy if you do not, but because you will be imperfect and unhappy.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
59. “The Soviet Union is like the Cross without Christ, while American culture is like Christ without the Cross.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
60. “Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man. The industrial civilization of the Western world has no intent to destroy man’s freedom or to deny his personality. But Communism does. Denying God, it reduces man to a robot.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
61. “Our happiest times are those in which we forget ourselves, usually in being kind to someone else. That tiny moment of self-abdication is an act of true humility: the man who loses himself finds himself and finds his happiness.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
62. “Prayer is helplessness casting itself on Power, infirmity leaning on Strength, misery reaching to Mercy, and a prisoner clamoring for Relief.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
63. “When a child is given to his parents, a crown is made for that child in Heaven, and woe to the parents who raise a child without consciousness of that eternal crown!”
— Fulton J. Sheen
64. “Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
65. “Never forget that there are only two philosophies to rule your life: the one of the cross, which starts with the fast and ends with the feast. The other of Satan, which starts with the feast and ends with the headache.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
66. “The way not to lead a monotonous life is to live for others.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
67. “No man discovers anything big if he does not make himself small.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
68. “To create the world cost God nothing; to save it from sin cost His Life Blood.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
69. “A smile across the aisle of a bus in the morning could save a suicide later in the day.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
70. “There are angels near you to guide you and protect you if you would but invoke them. It is not later than we think, it is a bigger world than we think.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
71. “To see a priest making his meditation before Mass does more for an altar boy’s vocation than a thousand pieces of inspirational literature.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
72. “I wonder maybe if our Lord does not suffer more from our indifference than He did from the crucifixion.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
73. “In vocal prayer we go to God on foot. In meditation, we go to God on horseback. In contemplation, we go to God in a jet.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
74. “The proud man counts his newspaper clippings, the humble man his blessings.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
75. “Scepticism is never certain of itself, being less a firm intellectual position than a pose to justify bad behavior.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
76. “We must go out to Pure Life, Pure Truth, Pure Love, and that is the definition of God. He is the ultimate goal of life; from Him, we came, and in Him alone do we find our peace.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
77. “All love craves unity. As the highest peak of love in the human order is the unity of husband and wife in the flesh, so the highest unity in the Divine order is the unity of the soul and Christ in communion.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
78. “It is the basic principle of Marxism that any attempt to reconcile capital and labor so that they both cooperate in peace and prosperity is a betrayal of communism.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
79. “Freedom that ignores the transcendent difference between good and evil ends in the denial of freedom itself.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
80. “Much suffering in hospitals is wasted.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
81. “The Christmas gift of peace was the uncoiling of the links of a triple chain that first unites a person with God, then with himself, then with his neighbor.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
82. “The forgiveness of God is one thing, but the proof that we want that forgiveness is the energy we expend to make amends for the wrong.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
83. “Satan always tempts the pure – the others are already his.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
84. “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.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
85. “Modern man has so long preached a doctrine of false tolerance; he has so long believed that right and wrong were only differences in a point of view, that now when evil works itself out in practice he is paralyzed to do anything against it.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
86. “In every friendship hearts grow and entwine themselves together, so that the two hearts seem to make only one heart with only a common thought. That is why separation is so painful; it is not so much two hearts separating, but one being torn asunder.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
87. “Our personal dispositions are as windowpanes through which we see the world either as rosy or dull. The way we color the glasses we wear is the way the world seems to us.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
88. “Why is it that any time we speak of temptation we always speak of temptation as something that inclines us to wrong. We have more temptations to become good than we do to become bad.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
89. “Atheism, nine times out of ten, is born from the womb of a bad conscience. Disbelief is born of sin, not of reason.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
90. “Once you have surrendered yourself, you make yourself receptive. In receiving from God, you are perfected and completed.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
91. “Counsel involving right and wrong should never be sought from a man who does not say his prayers.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
92. “Nature gives man corn but he must grind it; God gives man a will but he must make the right choices.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
93. “The Church knows too that to marry the present age and its spirit is to become a widow in the next.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
94. “Nothing ever happens in the world that does not happen first inside human hearts.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
95. “Every child should have an occasional pat on the back as long as it is applied low enough and hard enough.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
96. “A man may stand for the justice of God, but a woman stands for His Mercy.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
97. “There are 200 million poor in the world who would gladly take the vow of poverty if they could eat, dress and have a home like I do.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
98. “Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
99. “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.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
100. “When you are getting kicked from the rear it means you are in front.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
101. “The danger today is in believing there are no sick people, there is only a sick society.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
102. “A woman never tells you why she loves; she just tells you how she loves.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
103. “Science is not wisdom.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
104. “Nothing is more destined to create deep-seated anxieties in people than the false assumption that life should be free from anxieties.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
105. “Wars come from egotism and selfishness. Every macrocosmic or world war has its origin in microcosmic wars going on inside millions and millions of individuals.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
106. “Far better it is for you to say: “I am a sinner,” than to say: “I have no need of religion.” The empty can be filled, but the self-intoxicated have no room for God.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
107. “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 realized 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.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
108. “The very word mercy is derived from the Latin miserum cor, a sorrowful heart. Mercy is, therefore, a compassionate understanding of another’s unhappiness.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
109. “Man is incurably curious.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
110. “Imagine a large circle and in the center of it rays of light that spread out to the circumference. The light in the center is God; each of us is a ray. The closer the rays are to the center, the closer the rays are to one another. The closer we live to God, the closer we are bound to our neighbor; the farther we are from God, the farther we are from one another. The more each ray departs from its center, the weaker it becomes; and the closer it gets to the center, the stronger it becomes.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
111. “Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
112. “Sex has become one of the most discussed subjects of modern times. The Victorians pretended it did not exist; the moderns pretend nothing else exists.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
113. “The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
114. “Atheism is not a doctrine, it is a cry of wrath.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
115. “Communism is an aggressive religion of the species.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
116. “Liberty is no heirloom. It requires the daily bread of self-denial, the salt of law and, above all, the backbone of acknowledging responsibility for our deeds.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
117. “Weak men in high positions surround themselves with little men, in order that they may seem great by comparison.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
118. “Each of us comes into life with fists closed, set for aggressiveness and acquisition. But when we abandon life our hands are open; there is nothing on earth that we need, nothing the soul can take with it.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
119. “All love craves unity.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
120. “God prefers a loving sinner to a loveless “saint.” Love can be trained; pride cannot. The man who thinks that he knows will rarely find truth; the man who knows he is a miserable, unhappy sinner, like the woman at the well, is closer to peace, joy and salvation than he knows.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
121. “The Gospels did not start the Church; the Church started the Gospels. The Church did not come out of the Gospels; the Gospels came out of the Church.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
122. “There are no planes in the spiritual life; we are either going uphill or coming down.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
123. “One function of the angels is illumination, and the other function is that of being a guardian.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
124. “Once a man ceases to be of service to his neighbor, he begins to be a burden to him.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
125. “Most of us do not like to look inside ourselves for the same reason we don’t like to open a letter that has bad news.”
— Fulton J. Sheen
