Frank Sheed Quotes

It is of the very nature of partial seeing that we cannot see all the reconciliation of the parts we see, because it is only in the whole that they are one, and we do not see the whole. The word we form cannot wholly express God: only the Word He generates can do that. To be irked at this necessary darkness is as though we were irked at not being God.

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.

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.

The man who knows of the universe of spirit walks upright, the materialist hugs the earth.

To say that one sees the answer clearly would be to say that the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity is no mystery at all. We know that the Three Persons are not each other: we know that each is infinite and wholly God.

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.

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.

The first effect of realizing that one is made of nothing is a kind of panic-stricken insecurity. One looks round for some more stable thing to clutch, and in this matter none of the beings of our experience are any more stable than we, for at the origin of them all is the same truth: all are made of nothing.

We can never attain a maximum love of God with only a minimum knowledge of God

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.

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.

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;

With what purpose did God make material beings and spiritual beings and men who are both? Each thing He made to serve Him, and to serve Him by being totally itself. But within this total ordering of everything towards God there is a division: for, under God, spiritual beings are an end in themselves, matter is not. The earth is made for man, whereas man is not similarly made for the angels but men and angels alike for God only: they can serve one another, but it is not the service of a means to an end, but reciprocal service of the children of one father: the immortal beings have no end but God Himself.

There is no external operation of the divine nature which is the work of one Person as distinct from the Others.

What follows is very simple but revolutionary. If a carpenter makes a chair, he can leave it and the chair will not cease to be. For the material he used in its making has a quality called rigidity, by virtue of which it will retain its nature as a chair. The maker of the chair has left it, but the chair can still rely for continuance in existence upon the material he used, the wood. Similarly if the Maker of the Universe left it, the Universe too would have to rely for continuance in existence upon the material He used - nothing. In short, the truth that God used no material in our making carries with it the not-sufficiently-realized truth that God continues to hold us in being, and that unless He did so we should simply cease to be.

Just as space has parts lying alongside one another, time has parts following one another. The Infinite has no parts, of either (or any other conceivable) sort. Eternity is not time, however much we may try to glorify the concept of time.

St. Thomas adopts a division of the nine choirs into three groups, according to their intellectual perfection and consequent nearness in being to God - Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominations, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, Angels. Other writers suggest different arrangements; and there is a mass of magnificent theological speculation as to the difference of function between one choir and another. But the Church has defined nothing upon this matter.