Frank Sheed > Quotes

“...we can never attain a maximum love of God with only a minimum knowledge of God”
― Frank Sheed

“Sanity, remember, does not mean living in the same world as everyone else; it means living in the real world.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“Man is a rational animal. But that does not mean that he is a reasonable animal. It means only that he has reason, and therefore can misuse it. If he had not reason, he could not be unreasonable. But he has, and is.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“Bernard Shaw phrased the experience very admirably: “When we learn something, it feels at first as if we have lost something.” It is so, for instance, with a new stroke at tennis. Our old stroke had been a pretty incompetent affair, of the sort to make a professional laugh. But it had been ours, we were used to it, all our muscles were in the habit of it. The new stroke is doubtless better, but we are not in the way of it, we cannot do anything with it, and all the joy goes out of tennis—but only until we have mastered the new way. Then, quite suddenly, we find that the whole game is a new experience.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“The man who knows of the universe of spirit walks upright, the materialist hugs the earth.”
― F.J. Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“All theology consists in finding out what is meant by the words “He is.” Let us begin.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“Sin, for instance, is an effort to gain something against the will of God; but the will of God is all that holds us in existence;”
― F.J. Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“The theologian can ask far profounder questions because he knows more about God; by that same knowledge he knows that there are depths that he will never know. But to see why one cannot know more is itself a real seeing; there is a way of seeing the darkness which is a kind of light.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“a community is a multitude united by agreement about the things they love.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“A Mystery in short is an invitation to the mind. For it means that there is an inexhaustible well of Truth from which the mind may drink and drink again in the certainty that the well will never run dry, that there will always be water for the mind’s thirst.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“Eternity is not time at all. It is God’s total possession of Himself.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“A mental habit has been annihilated, but at least the way towards a sounder mental habit is clear. For although we are made of nothing, we are made into something; and since WHAT WE ARE MADE OF does not account for us, we are forced to a more intense concentration upon THE GOD WE ARE MADE BY.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“The Lord has made all things for Himself (Prov.xvi.4): apart from Himself there existed nothing to make them for. He made them for His own sake, for His own pleasure. But it was His pleasure to bring into existence things that could take pleasure in existence. For our sakes He made us for His sake. To us there is something mysterious in an altruism so total, but something exciting in the mystery. Among all the mysteries, many are greater, but it is hard to think of one more pleasing.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“We cannot use anything intelligently until we know what it is for.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“Sanity, remember, does not mean living in the same world as everyone else; it means living in the real world. But some of the most important elements in the real world can be known only by the revelation of God, which it is theology’s business to study. Lacking this knowledge, the mind must live a half-blind life, trying to cope with a reality most of which it does not know is there. This is a wretched state for an immortal spirit, and pretty certain to lead to disaster. There is a good deal of disaster around at this moment. F. J. S.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“To overlook God's presence is not simply to be irreligious: it is a kind of insanity, like overlooking anything else that is actually there.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“Each of our powers seeks its own outlet, each of our needs its own immediate gratification; we have not the subordination of all our powers to reason and of reason to God which would unify all our striving; every one of us is a civil war. At two points principally the disorder is at its worst, the passions and the imagination.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“The universe God called into being has in it these two great divisions—the world of spirits and the world of matter.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“humanity, finite, created in time, fallen and redeemed by Christ; the individual man born into the life of nature, reborn into the life of grace, united with Christ in the Church which is His Mystical Body, aided by angels, hindered by devils, destined for heaven, in peril of hell.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“Here the dialogue form breaks down. From the believer’s mouth there emerges what can only be called a soup of words, sentences that begin and do not end, words that change into something else halfway. This goes on for a longer or shorter time.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“What is sure is what God has revealed. With that we can start our exploration. In our exploring what is sure is that what the Church has defined is true, what the Church has condemned is false: Christ established a Church that could do us this essential service. For most of us, exploration will be only the effort to understand as much as is thus certain. And it is immensely rewarding.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“So many of our troubles flow from a defective use of the intelligence or will or energy we have, that we are in danger of thinking that all our troubles could be cured by a better use of our own powers—”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“It would be a strange God who could be loved better by being known less. Love of God is not the same thing as knowledge of God; love of God is immeasurably more important than knowledge of God; but if a man loves God knowing a little about Him, he should love God more from knowing more about Him: for every new thing known about God is a new reason for loving Him.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“The man who does not see God may have vast knowledge of this or that section of being, but he is like a man who should know all about the eye never having seen a face.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“and use the uttermost effort of our mind to purify them of the limitations that arise in them from our limitation. That is the way of advance for the mind. Human language is not adequate to utter God, but it is the highest we have and we should use its highest words.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“Our ideas are not material. They have no resemblance to our body. Their resemblance is to our spirit. They have no shape, no size, no color, no weight, no space. Neither has spirit whose offspring they are. But no one can call it nothing; for it produces thought, and thought is the most powerful thing in the world—unless love is, which spirit also produces.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“...it is by the saints, and not by the mediocre, still less by the great sinners, that the Church is to be judged. It may seem a loading of the dice to demand that any institution be judged solely by its best members, but in this instance it is not. A medicine must be judged not by those who buy it but by those who actually take it. A Church must be judged by those who hear and obey, not by those who half-hear and disobey when obedience is difficult.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“He made all things from nothing, and these perfections will be in things only in so far as nothingness can receive them, or to put it crudely, with a certain mingling of nothingness: whereas they are in God in utter purity.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“And as we shall see, the direct power the human mind has over its own body, mightier spirits have over all matter.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“The soul has two faculties and they should be clearly distinguished. There is the will: its work is to love—and so to choose, to decide, to act. There is the intellect: its work is TO KNOW, TO UNDERSTAND, TO SEE: to see what—TO SEE WHAT’S THERE.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity