Theology for Beginners Quotes

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

“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

“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

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

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

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

“ignorance about the Supreme Being is worse poverty than ignorance about any of the lesser beings He has created of nothing.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“the sin of the representative man.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“He was the man. He was the representative man. For the angels the testing had been individual; each angel who fell did so by his own decision.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“begins,”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“We say that a given habit grows on us. Really it grows in us, becomes second nature.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“Whatever the soul in charity loves, it loves for what of God is in it, the amount of God’s goodness it expresses or mirrors. This is true love, since it means loving things or persons not for what we can get out of them but for what God has put into them, not for what they can do for us but for what is real in them: it means loving things or persons for what they are, and it is rooted in loving God for what He is.”
― 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

“Truth is light too. Not to see it is to be in darkness, to see it wrong is to be in double darkness.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“man is essentially a social being. We should not come into existence unless other humans produced us, or stay in existence unless they maintained us in it.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“cats are matter, with no spirit to complicate it.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“The Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth”; that accounts for his body. And “He breathed into his face the breath of life.”
― 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

“to clarify our notion of mystery: which does not mean a truth that we cannot know anything about, but a truth that we cannot know everything about.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“We possess our being, the philosophers say, successively.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“Yet the human soul is the lowest of spirits. The least of the angels is unimaginably superior in power”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“Material beings can be destroyed in the sense that they can be broken up into their constituent parts: what has parts can be taken apart. But a partless being lies beyond all this. Nothing can be taken from it, because there is nothing in it but its whole self. We can conceive, of course, of its whole self being taken out of existence. This would be annihilation. But just as only God can create from nothing by willing a being to exist, so only God can reduce a being to nothing by willing it no longer to exist: and for the human soul, God has told us that He will not thus will it out of existence.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“If it occupies space at all, be it ever so microscopic, or so infinitesimally submicroscopic, there must be some “spread.” Space is simply what matter spreads its parts in. But a being with no parts at all has no spread; space and it have nothing whatever in common; it is spaceless; it is superior to the need for space.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“A spirit differs from a material thing by having no parts. Once we have mastered the meaning of this, we are close to our goal.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“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

“If we are continuously producing things which have no attribute of matter, there must be in us some element which is not matter, to produce them. This element we call spirit.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“ours is the only spirit which is a soul, so ours is the only soul which is a spirit.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“Every living body—vegetable, lower animal, human—has a life principle, a soul.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners

“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

“no record,”
― Frank Sheed, Theology for Beginners