Theology and Sanity Quotes

“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 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

“All theology consists in finding out what is meant by the words “He is.” Let us begin.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Physical law or moral law, to know what it is is to know the reality of things: to act in accordance with it is to act by the reality of things. And that is sanity.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“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

“tribulation”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“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

“The whole of this discourse, from the fourteenth chapter of St. John to the seventeenth, should be read and read again: everything is in it.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“It is obviously an overwhelming limitation that one never wholly possesses one’s self, that one possesses one’s being in successive moments and not simply in one act of being, that one is never all there. There is no such limitation in God. He possesses Himself wholly in one act of being. This is what we call His ETERNITY.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“before the universe” means when there wasn’t any when; which is to say that it doesn’t mean anything at all.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“where was God before the universe existed—fades away into the inconsiderable question: what created thing was being held in existence by the power of God before there was any created thing?”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“For all spaceless beings the word WHERE has one meaning; a spaceless being is WHERE IT OPERATES, IT IS IN THE THINGS WHICH RECEIVE THE EFFECTS OF ITS POWER.”
― 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

“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

“One of the results of the Fall of Man is that imagination has got completely out of hand; and even one who does not believe in that “considerable catastrophe “, as Hilaire Belloc calls it, must at least admit that imagination plays a part in the mind’s affairs totally out of proportion to its merits, so much out of proportion indeed as to suggest some longstanding derangement in man’s nature.”
― 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

“There you have the two-fold element in man, the slime of the earth and the likeness of God. And both elements belong. The matter of our body is not simply an extra, something we should be better without, something to be grown out of as the butterfly grows out of the grub, something in some happier future to be discarded as the butterfly discards the cocoon. Matter is part of the very nature of man, he would not be man without it: and he would not perform his function in the universe without it. For it is precisely his function to join the two worlds of matter and spirit into one universe, and he does it by belonging essentially to both of them.”
― 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

“The less instructed atheist will ask whether God can make a weight so heavy that He cannot lift it, in the happy belief that, whichever answer we give, we shall admit that there is something God cannot do. But the question is literally meaningless: a weight than an omnipotent Being cannot lift is as complete a contradiction in terms as a four-sided triangle. In either case the words are English, but do not mean anything because they cancel each other out. There is no point in piling together a lot of words, regardless of their meaning, and then asking triumphantly: 'Can God make that?' God can do anything, but a contradiction in terms is not a thing at all. It is nothing. God Himself could not make a four-sided triangle or a weight that Almighty power could not lift. They are inconceivable, they are nothing; and nothing--to give a slightly different emphasis to Scripture--is impossible to God.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“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.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“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.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity

“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.”
― Frank Sheed, Theology and Sanity