“Each day he has a new idol, each week a new mood. His authority is public opinion: when that shifts, his frustrated soul shifts with it.”

— Fulton J. Sheen

Source: Peace of Soul (1949), Ch. 1, pp. 7–8
Context: The modern man is no longer a unity, but a confused bundle of complexes and nerves. He is so dissociated, so alienated from himself that he sees himself less as a personality than as a battlefield where a civil war rages between a thousand and one conflicting loyalties. There is no single overall purpose in his life. His soul is comparable to a menagerie in which a number of beasts, each seeking its own prey, turn one upon the other. Or he may be likened to a radio, that is tuned in to several stations; instead of getting any one clearly, it receives only an annoying static.If the frustrated soul is educated, it has a smattering of uncorrected bits of information with no unifying philosophy. Then the frustrated soul may say to itself: "I sometimes think there are two of me a living soul and a Ph. D." Such a man projects his own mental confusion to the outside world and concludes that, since he knows no truth, nobody can know it. His own skepticism (which he universalizes into a philosophy of life) throws him back more and more upon those powers lurking in the dark, dank caverns of his unconsciousness. He changes his philosophy as he changes his clothes. On Monday, he lays down the tracks of materialism; on Tuesday, he reads a best seller, pulls up the old tracks, and lays the new tracks of an idealist; on Wednesday, his new roadway is Communistic; on Thursday, the new rails of Liberalism are laid; on Friday, he-hears a broadcast and decides to travel on Freudian tracks: on Saturday, he takes a long drink to forget his railroading and, on Sunday, ponders why people are so foolish as to go to Church. Each day he has a new idol, each week a new mood. His authority is public opinion: when that shifts, his frustrated soul shifts with it.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Each day he has a new idol, each week a new mood. His authority is public opinion: when that shifts, his frustrated sou…" by Fulton J. Sheen?

Fulton J. Sheen 78

Catholic bishop and television presenter 1895–1979

Related quotes

“Thus times do shift, each thing his turn does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.”

Robert Herrick book Hesperides

"Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve".
Hesperides (1648)

“Stephen has gone out on a limb. He is proposing a paradigm shift. A new twist on everything.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

Gregory Chaitin as quoted by Edward Rothstein in [A Man Who Would Shake Up Science; Physicist Says He's Explained The Way Nature Operates, 11 May 2002, The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/11/books/man-who-would-shake-up-science-physicist-says-he-s-explained-way-nature-operates.html]

“In politics there is no morality anyway. The nature of the game precludes it. A politician's career depends upon the fickle wind of public opinion. He is forced to trim his conscience to catch every shift of the breeze.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Gil Langton in Ch. 3, p. 38
The Ringmaster (1991)

“Terrible is the day when each sees his soul naked, stripped of all veil; that dear soul which he cannot change or discard, and which is so irreparably his.”

George Moore (novelist) (1852–1933) Irish novelist, short-story writer, poet, art critic, memoirist and dramatist

Source: Confessions of a Young Man http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12278/12278-h/12278-h.htm (1886), Ch. 1.

“The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“When he talked of their Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff,
He shifted his trumpet and only took snuff.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

Source: Retaliation (1774), Line 145.

“L.B.J. operated in an environment in which if he got a couple of committee chairmen to agree he had a deal. Those chairmen didn’t have to worry about a Tea Party challenge. About cable news. That model has progressively shifted for each president. It’s not a fear-versus-a-nice-guy approach that is the choice. The question is: How do you shape public opinion and frame an issue so that it’s hard for the opposition to say no. And these days you don’t do that by saying, ‘I’m going to withhold an earmark,’ or ‘I’m not going to appoint your brother-in-law to the federal bench.’”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2012
Context: The gist of Obama’s advice to any would-be president is something like this: You may think that the presidency is essentially a public-relations job. Relations with the public are indeed important, maybe now more than ever, as public opinion is the only tool he has for pressuring an intractable opposition to agree on anything. He admits that he has been guilty, at times, of misreading the public. He badly underestimated, for instance, how little it would cost Republicans politically to oppose ideas they had once advocated, merely because Obama supported them. He thought the other side would pay a bigger price for inflicting damage on the country for the sake of defeating a president. But the idea that he might somehow frighten Congress into doing what he wanted was, to him, clearly absurd. “All of these forces have created an environment in which the incentives for politicians to cooperate don’t function the way they used to,” he said. “L. B. J. operated in an environment in which if he got a couple of committee chairmen to agree he had a deal. Those chairmen didn’t have to worry about a Tea Party challenge. About cable news. That model has progressively shifted for each president. It’s not a fear-versus-a-nice-guy approach that is the choice. The question is: How do you shape public opinion and frame an issue so that it’s hard for the opposition to say no. And these days you don’t do that by saying, ‘I’m going to withhold an earmark,’ or ‘I’m not going to appoint your brother-in-law to the federal bench.’”

“He believed in himself, believed in his quixotic ambition, letting the failures of the previous day disappear as each new day dawned. Yesterday was not today. The past did not predict the future if he could learn from his mistakes.”

Daniel Wallace (1959) American author

Source: The Kings and Queens of Roam

“With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It's like quicksand… hopeless from the start.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

1950-07-08
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)

“We are each the authors of our own lives, Emma. We live in what we have created. There is no way to shift the blame and no one else to accept the accolades.”

Barbara Taylor Bradford A Woman of Substance

Source: A Woman of Substance

“Each day he has a new idol, each week a new mood. His authority is public opinion: when that shifts, his frustrated soul shifts with it.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Fulton J. Sheen 78

Related quotes

Related topics