Three to Get Married Quotes

“How can one love self without being selfish? How can one love others without losing self? The answer is: By loving both self and neighbor in God. It is His Love that makes us love both self and neighbor rightly.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“Imagine a large circle and in the center of it rays of light that spread out to the circumference. The light in the center is God; each of us is a ray. The closer the rays are to the center, the closer the rays are to one another. The closer we live to God, the closer we are bound to our neighbor; the farther we are from God, the farther we are from one another. The more each ray departs from its center, the weaker it becomes; and the closer it gets to the center, the stronger it becomes.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“Those who do not yet love one another deeply have need of words; those who deeply love thrive on silences.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“Love of self without love of God is selfishness; love of neighbor without love of God embraces only those who are pleasing to us, not those who are hateful.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“In all human love it must be realized that every man promises a woman, and every woman promises a man that which only God alone can give, namely, perfect happiness. One of the reasons why so many marriages are shipwrecked is because as the young couple leave the altar, they fail to realize that human feelings tire and the enthusiasm of the honeymoon is not the same as the more solid happiness of enduring human love. One of the greatest trials of marriage is the absence of solitude. In the first moments of human love, one does not see the little hidden deformities which later on appear.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“It loves the other, not because of attractiveness, or talents, or sympathy, but because of God. To the Christian, a person is one for whom I must sacrifice myself, not one who must exist for my sake.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“The more clearly a man understands anything, the more readily he can summarize it in a few words.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“One of the psychological reasons why decent people shrink from vulgar sex discussion is because by its very nature it is not a communicable kind of knowledge... It is too sacred to be profaned.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“The basic reason why erotic experiences outside of marriage create psychological strain is because the void between spirit and flesh is more closely felt.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“the sadness it feels in attaining any happiness less than the infinite—all these constitute the mating call of God to the soul.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“Each instinct and passion of man is amoral; it is only the abuse of these passions that makes them wrong. There is nothing wrong about hunger, but there is something wrong about gluttony; there is no sin in thirst, but there is a sin in drunkenness; there is nothing wrong with a man who seeks economic security, but there is something wrong with a man who is avaricious; there is nothing to be despised in knowledge, but there is something to be condemned in pride; there is nothing wrong with the flesh, but there is something wrong in the abuse of the flesh. Just as dirt is matter in the wrong place, so sin is flesh in the wrong place. Sex has its place in that area of life designed for its fruition, but the misuse of it outside of that natural and supernatural bond is wrong.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“Remarriage while the true partner is living is a vain attempt to give respectability to dishonor by invoking a human law that overthrows God’s law:”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“One can yearn for another after knowing flesh unity, but it is impossible to yearn for another after soul unity.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“Weak men in high positions surround themselves with little men, in order that they may seem great by comparison.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“In sex the male adores the female. In love the man and woman together adore God.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“To love what is below the human is degradation; to love what is human for the sake of the human is mediocrity; to love the human for the sake of the Divine is enriching; to love the Divine for its own sake is sanctity.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“The difference between sex and love is like the difference between an education without a philosophy of life and one with such an integrating factor. A system without a philosophy measures progress in terms of substitution. Spencer is substituted for Kant, Marx for Spencer, Freud for Marx. There is no continuity in mental development, any more than the automobile grew out of the horse and buggy. But in a Christian education, there is a deepening of a mystery. One starts with a simple truth that God exists. Instead of abandoning that idea when one begins to study science, one deepens his knowledge of God with a study of the Trinity and then begins to see the tremendous ramifications of Divine Power in the universe, of Divine Providence in history, and of Divine Mercy in the human heart.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“Love demands something unrevealed; it flourishes, therefore, only in mystery. No one ever wants to hear a singer hit her highest note, nor an orator “tear a passion to tatters,” for once mystery and the infinite are denied, life’s urge is stilled and its passion glutted. In a true marriage, there is an ever-enchanting romance. There are at least four distinct mysteries progressively revealed. First, there is the mystery of the other partner, which is body-mystery. When that mystery is solved and the first child is born, there begins a new mystery. The husband sees something in the wife he never before knew existed, namely, the beautiful mystery of motherhood. She sees a new mystery in him she never before knew existed, namely, the mystery of fatherhood. As other children come to revive their strength and beauty, the husband never seems older to the wife than the day they were married, and the wife never seems older than the day they first met and carved their initials in an oak tree. As the children reach the age of reason, a third mystery unfolds, that of fathercraft and mothercraft—the disciplining and training of young minds and hearts in the ways of God. As the children grow into maturity, the mystery continues to deepen, new areas of exploration open up, and the father and mother now see themselves as sculptors in the great quarry of humanity, carving living stones and fitting them together in the Temple of God, Whose Architect is Love. The fourth mystery is their contribution to the well-being of the nation. Here, too, is the root of democracy, for it is in the family that a person is valued not for what he is worth, nor for what he can do, but primarily for what he is.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“THOSE who start with the pagan philosophy of sex must face life as a descent. Associated with a growing old, there is a loss of physical energy and the horrible perspective of death. The Christian philosophy of love, on the contrary, implies an ascension. The body may grow older, but the Spirit grows younger, and love often becomes more intense.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“It is possible to love more than we know. A simple person in good faith may have a greater love of God than a theologian and, as a result, a keener understanding of the ways of God with the heart than psychologists have.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“What some people love is not a person but the experience of being in love. The first is irreplaceable; the second is not.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“The Trinity is the answer to the questions of Plato.
If there is only one God, what does He think about? He thinks an eternal thought: His eternal Word, or Son.
If there is only one God, whom does he love? He loves His Son, and that mutual love is the Holy Spirit.
The great philosopher was fumbling about for the mystery of the Trinity, for his noble mind seemed in some small way to suspect that an infinite being must have relations of thought and love. But it was not until the Word became Incarnate that man knew the secret of those relations and the inner life of God, for it was Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who revealed to us the inmost life of God.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“These four effects of love are: unity, mutual indwelling, ecstasy, and zeal.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“As life goes on, they become not two compatible beings who have learned to live together through self-suppression and patience, but one new and richer being, fused in the fires of God’s love and tempered of the best of both. One by one, the veils of life’s mysteries have been lifted. The flesh, they found, was too precocious to reveal its own mystery; then came the mystery of the other’s inner life, disclosed in the raising of young minds and hearts in the ways of God;”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“The mystery of creativeness is surrounded with awe. A special reverence does envelop the power to be co-creators with God in the making of human life. It is this hidden element that in a special way belongs to God, as does the grace of God in the sacraments. Those who speak of sex alone concentrate on the physical or visible element, forgetting the spiritual or invisible mystery of creativeness. Humans in the sacraments supply the act, the bread, the water, and the words; God supplies the grace, the mystery. In the sacred act of creating life, man and woman supply the unity of the flesh; God supplies the soul and the mystery. Such is the mystery of sex.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“The lover of God never knows the words “too much.” Those who accuse others of loving God or religion too much really do not love God at all, nor do they know the meaning of love.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“As love comes from knowledge, so hatred comes from want of knowledge. Bigotry is the fruit of ignorance.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“The loves of all hearts are so many mirrors revealing their characters.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“Everyone believes in the eternity of love, and eternal love is found only in God. To just the extent that the sparks of earthly love are stolen from the great heart and hearth of God does earthly love remain abiding. They who possess this fides every now and then are cast into the ecstasy of love and are lifted to a higher dimension of ravishing affection, but knowing its Source and Origin, they whisper to themselves in sweet anticipation of heaven: “If the spark is so great, oh, what must be the flame!”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married

“Virginity among pagans meant a bodily condition, a physical intactness, a preserved isolation, to which there was nothing corresponding in the man. Hence pagans never glorified the virgin man, but only the virgin maid. But with Christianity, virginity ceased to mean physical intactness but unity. It meant not separation but relationship, not the will of another person alone, but also the will of God.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married