I remember as a small kid being intrigued by a show that was very popular in the 1950s and 60s. It was called “Life is Worth Living” and later “The Fulton Sheen Program.” It featured inspirational talks by Catholic Archbishop, Fulton J. Sheen. It is said that he spoke without a script or cue cards.
Sheen was warm and personal and spoke humbly from his heart. Somehow his mannerism and words about life and about God would touch me deep within. He talked about the meaning of life and about how God had a purpose for people. Although, I was in a non-religious home, when I came across him on TV, my heart was often drawn into what he said, and I would watch him for a while.
Here are some quotes from him:
“Nothing ever happens in the world that does not happen first inside human hearts.”
“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.”
“We know nothing about the inside of our neighbor’s heart, and hence, we refuse to forgive. Jesus knew the heart inside out, and because He did know, He forgave.”
“Unbelievers see us in shops, in theatres, at meetings. Whether they see Christ in us depends on whether we act like Christ.”
“God accepts only what His Spirit inspires. We must bring back to God what He has given.”
“Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.”
“The poison of hate, sensuality, and envy which is in the hearts of men could not be healed simply by wise exhortations and social reforms.” (Our inner healing and transformation requires surrender to the risen Jesus who Sheen called “Our Blessed Lord.)
“The method of adjusting moral principles to the way men live is just a perversion of the order of things.”
“The modern world, which denies personal guilt and admits only social crimes, has no place for personal repentance but only public reforms.”
“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.”
“There has been no single influence which has done more to prevent man from finding God and rebuilding his character, has done more to lower the moral tone of society than the denial of personal guilt. This repudiation of man’s personal responsibility for his action is falsely justified in two ways: by assuming that man is only an animal and by giving a sense of guilt the tag “morbid.”
“Unhappy souls almost always blame everyone but themselves for their miseries.”
“The world blesses not the meek, but the vindictive; it praises not the one who turns the other cheek, but the one who renders evil for evil; it exalts not the humble, but the aggressive. Ideological forces have carried that spirit of violence, class-struggle, and the clenched fist to an extreme the like of which the world before has never seen.”
“If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself.”
“Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them.”
“We live in days of assassins—where evil is sought in lives more than good to justify a world with a bad conscience.”
“Politics has become so all-possessive of life, that by impertinence it thinks the only philosophy a person can hold is the right or the left. This question puts out all the lights of religion so they can call all the cats gray. It assumes that man lives on a purely horizontal plane, and can move only to the right or the left. Had we eyes less material, we would see that there are two other directions where a man with a soul may look: the vertical directions of ‘up’ or ‘down.’”
“The nearer Christ comes to a heart, the more it becomes conscious of its guilt; it will then either ask for His mercy and find peace, or else it will turn against Him because it is not yet ready to give up its sinfulness.”
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