Famous Quotes & Sayings

Paul Tillich Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Paul Tillich.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Famous Quotes By Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1111083

You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted! — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1600299

The separation of faith and love is always a consequence of a deterioration of religion. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1266616

Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 2083344

The law of love is the ultimate law because it is the negation of law; it is absolute because it concerns everything concrete. The paradox of final revelation, overcoming the conflict between absolutism and relativism, is love. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1394579

Existential anxiety of doubt drives the person toward the creation of certitude of systems of meaning, which are supported by tradition and authority. Neurotic anxiety builds a narrow castle of certitude which can be defended with the utmost certainty. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 107417

The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. "Existential" in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one's existence ... There are realms of reality or - more exactly - of abstraction from reality in which the most complete detachment is the adequate cognitive approach. Everything which can be expressed in terms of quantitative measurement has this character. But it is most inadequate to apply the same approach to reality in its infinite concreteness. A self which has become a matter of calculation and management has ceased to be a self. It has become a thing. You must participate in a self in order to know what it is. But by participating you change it. In all existential knowledge both subject and object are transformed by the very act of knowing. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 964596

Parents need to listen as much to their kids as they do to them: "The first duty of love is to listen." — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 705719

The joy about our work is spoiled when we perform it not because of what we produce but because of the pleasure with which it can provide us, or the pain against which it can protect us. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 192541

Accept the fact that you are accepted, despite the fact that you are unacceptable. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1463875

We are known in a depth of darkness through which we ourselves do not even dare to look. And at the same time, we are seen in a height of a fullness which surpasses our highest vision. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1823306

Nothing truly real is forgotten eternally, because everything real comes from eternity and goes to eternity. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1884606

Where there is faith there is an awareness of holiness. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1383237

There is no condition for forgiveness. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 515857

Courage is a greater virtue than love. At best, it takes courage to love. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1848361

Truth without the way to truth is dead. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 936989

The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the universe . — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 972452

In this respect fundamentalism has demonic traits. It destroys the humble honesty of the search for truth, it splits the conscience of its thoughtful adherents, and it makes them fanatical because they are forced to suppress elements of truth of which they are dimly aware — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 164191

Man is able to decide for or against reason, he is able to create beyond reason or to destroy below reason — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 2048950

Love that cares, listens. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 312535

The courage to be as oneself within the atmosphere of Enlightenment is the courage to affirm oneself as a bridge from a lower to a higher state of rationality. It is obvious that this kind of courage to be must become conformist the moment its revolutionary attack on that which contradicts reason has ceased, namely in the victorious bourgeoisie. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 394795

Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 279016

Man is the question he asks about himself, before any question has been formulated. It is, therefore, not surprising that the basic questions were formulated very early in the history of mankind. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 781640

Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1806348

Destiny is not a strange power which determines what shall happen to me. It is myself as given, formed by nature, history, and myself. My destiny is the basis of my freedom; my freedom participates in shaping my destiny. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1390845

The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 883541

Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1261872

Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, revolt against the objectified world has determined the character of art and literature. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 665455

Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1466172

And he wanted more than anything else, deeply and compassionately, to be of help; and he could be of help in this age, and was of help, because artist and philosopher as well as theologian, he cared for culture as well as for Christ.6 — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 2016076

Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 786160

I have given no definition of love. This is impossible, because there is no higher principle by which it could be defined. It is life itself in its actual unity. The forms and structures in which love embodies itself are the forms and structures in which love overcomes its self-destructive forces. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 611576

This is biblical ethics. It has little to do with the middle-class ethics of avoiding a few things which are supposed to be wrong and doing a few things which are supposed to be right. Biblical ethics means standing in ultimate decisions for or against God. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1194225

If my tongue were trained to measures, I would sing a stirring song. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1435344

In a man like Friedrich von Schlegel the courage to be as an individual self produced complete neglect of participation, but it also produced, in reaction to the emptiness of this self-affirmation, the desire to return to a collective. Schlegel, and with him many extreme individualists in the last hundred years, became Roman Catholics. The courage to be as oneself broke down, and one turned to an institutional embodiment of the courage to be as a part. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1417792

The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 2199335

In the state of despair there is nobody and nothing that accepts. But there is the power of acceptance itself which is experienced. Meaninglessness, as long as it is experienced, includes an experience of the "power of acceptance". To accept this power of acceptance consciously is the religious answer of absolute faith, of a faith which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 2225430

We must be ourselves, we must decide where to go. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 2186918

Providence," he argues, "is not a theory about some activities of God; it is the religious symbol of the courage of confidence with respect to fate and death. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 105868

One cannot be strong without love. For love is not an irrelevant emotion; it is the blood of life. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 2256854

Plato ... teaches the separation of the human soul from its " home " in the realm of pure essences. Man is estranged from what he essentially is. His existence in a transitory world contradicts his essential participation in the eternal world of ideas . — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1471891

Man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1485330

[American] conformism might approximate collectivism, not so much in economic respects, and not too much in political respects, but very much in the pattern of daily life and thought. Whether this will happen or not, and if it does to what degree, is partly dependent on the power of resistance in those who represent the opposite pole of the courage to be, the courage to be as oneself. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1527915

Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1548523

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1550317

The typical American, after he has lost the foundations of his existence, works for new foundations — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1557598

Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 2122974

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements - as well as one's deepest failures - is a definite symptom of maturity. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1569726

Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1592669

The fact that man never is satisfied with any stage of his finite development, the fact that nothing finite can hold him, although finitude is his destiny, indicates the indissoluble relation of everything finite to being-itself. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 2057758

Wisdom loves the children of men, but she prefers those who come through foolishness to wisdom. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1611445

Astonishment is the root of philosophy. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1663600

Anxiety may consist of the loss of psychological or spiritual meaning which is identified with one's existence as a self, i.e., the threat of meaninglessness. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 2055267

Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object, which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured ... anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 2037882

Real joy is a "severe matter"; it is the happiness of a soul which is "lifted above every circumstance. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1785872

God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 2015133

Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it.
Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1972923

He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1836249

I hope for the day when everyone can speak of God without embarrassment. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1965158

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: You are accepted. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1841298

Neither the Ten Commandments nor the great commandment is revelatory if separated from the divine covenant with Israel or from the presence of the Kingdom of God in the Christ. These commandments were meant and should be taken as interpretations of a new reality, not as orders directed against the old reality. They are descriptions and not laws.
~ vol. 1, p.125 — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1847182

It is the expression of the anxiety of meaninglessness and of the attempt to take this anxiety into the courage to be as oneself. (139) — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 306561

In the depth of the anxiety of having to die is the anxiety of being eternally forgotten. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 844007

The most intimate motions within the depths of our souls are not completely our own. For they belong also to our friends, to humankind, to the universe, and the Ground of all being, the aim of our life. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 777364

There is no place to which we could flee from God, which is outside of God. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 719722

He who knows about depth knows about God. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 664257

Only if God IS ultimate reality, can he be our unconditional concern; only then can he be the object of surrender, obedience, and assent. Faith in anything which has only preliminary reality is idolatrous. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 523874

Every institution is inherently demonic. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 487119

Love is the infinite which is given to the finite. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 455705

The faith which makes the courage of despair possible is the acceptance of the power of being, even in the grip of non-being. Even in the despair about meaning being affirms itself through us. The act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act. It is an act of faith. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 443202

In Calvinism and sectarianism man became more and more transformed into an abstract moral subject, as in Descartes he was considered an epistemological subject. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 403609

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 859940

Fear is the absence of faith. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 302761

Christianity sees in the picture of Jesus as the Christ a human life in which all forms of anxiety are present but in which all forms of despair are absent. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 286965

Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements. Faith is the most centered act of the human mind. It is not a movement of a special section or a special function of (our) total being. They all are united in the act of faith. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 244014

Mystical identification transcends the aristocratic virtue of courageous self-sacrifice. It is self- surrender in a higher, more complete, and more complete and more radical form. It is the perfect form of self-affirmation. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 209198

The first duty of love is to listen. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 207235

There is faith in every serious doubt, namely, the faith in the truth as such, even if the only truth we can express is our lack of truth. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 156661

The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 135848

For encountering God means encountering transcendent security and transcendent eternity. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 128604

One of the unfortunate consequences of the intellectualization of man's spiritual life was that the word "spirit" was lost and replaced by mind or intellect, and that the element of vitality which is present in "spirit" was separated and interpreted as an independent biological force. Man was divided into a bloodless intellect and a meaningless vitality. The middle ground between them, the spiritual soul, in which vitality and intentionality are united, was dropped. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 108234

Our spirituality is the ground of our being. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1139788

The "stigma" of finitude which appears in all things and in the whole of reality and the "shock" which grasps the mind when it encounters the threat of nonbeing reveal the negative side of the mystery, the abysmal element in the ground of being. This negative side is always potentially present, and it can be realized in cognitive as well as in communal experiences. It is a necessary element in revelation. Without it the mystery would not be mystery. Without the "I am undone" of Isaiah in his vocational vision, God cannot be experienced (Isa. 6: 5). Without the "dark night of the soul," the mystic cannot experience the mystery of the ground. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1383927

The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1341135

Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1336761

...sin is separation. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1262229

Enthusiasm for the universe, in knowing as well as in creating, also answers the question of doubt and meaninglessness. Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge. And meaninglessness is no threat so long as enthusiasm for the universe and for man as its center is alive. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1222614

Forgiving presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting not in the natural way we forget yesterday's weather, but in the way of the great "in spite of" that says: I forget although I remember. Without this kind of forgetting no human relationship can endure healthily. I don't refer to a solemn act of asking for and offering forgiveness. Such rituals as sometimes occur between parents and children, or friends, or man and wife, are often acts of moral arrogance on the one part and enforced humiliation on the other. But I speak of the lasting willingness to accept him who has hurt us. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1218531

Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1206945

Individualism is the self-affirmation of the individual self as individual self without regard to its participation in its world. As such it is the opposite of collectivism, the self affirmation of the self as part of a larger whole without regard to its character as an individual self. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1193940

The citizens of a city are not guilty of the crimes committed in their city; but they are guilty as participants in the destiny of [humanity] as a whole and in the destiny of their city in particular; for their acts in which freedom was united with destiny have contributed to the destiny in which they participate. They are guilty, not of committing the crimes of which their group is accused, but of contributing to the destiny in which these crimes happened. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1172990

Man creates what he is. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1388490

The courage to die is the test of the courage to be. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1132270

We have to build a better man before we can build a better society. All that is necessary for the # triumph of # evil is that good people do nothing. Our # purpose is not to make a living but a# life - a worthy, well-rounded, useful life. # Morality is not a subject; it is a life put to the test in dozens of moments. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1100897

He who participates in God participates in eternity. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1066630

Man is not what he believes himself to be in his conscious decisions. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1059123

Faith ... is a concern of the whole person; it is the most personal concern, and that which determines all others. ... it is not something which we can produce by the will to believe, but that by which we are grasped. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 1028037

In the courageous standing of uncertainty, faith shows most visibly its dynamic character. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 977427

Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude. — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 956650

Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of a meaning of our life. Paul Tillich — Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich Quotes 916083

Faith embraces itself and the doubt about itself. — Paul Tillich