Paul Tournier Quotes & Sayings

The worst thing is not being wrong, but being sure one is not wrong. — Paul Tournier

Marriage teaches you loyalty, forbearance, self-restraint, meekness, and a great many other things you wouldn't need if you had stayed single. — Paul Tournier

Recounting of a life story, a mind thinking aloud leads one inevitably to the consideration of problems which are no longer psychological but spiritual. — Paul Tournier

Acceptance of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary it means accepting it as it comes ... To accept is to say yes to life in its entirety. — Paul Tournier

Woe to the man who tries to remain objective and to maintain a wide perspective: every one will label him as an enemy. — Paul Tournier

We are nearly always longing for an easy religion, easy to understand and easy to follow; a religion with no mystery, no insoluble problems,no snags; a religion that would allow us to escape from our miserable human condition; a religion in which contact with God spares us all strife, all uncertainty,all suffering and all doubt; in short, a religion without a cross — Paul Tournier

Your manner of life now is already determining your life in those years of old age and retirement, without your realizing it even, and perhaps without your giving enough thought to it. One must therefore prepare oneself for retirement. — Paul Tournier

Disgusted by the abuses to which it led, humanity repressed Christianity by which it had so long been dominated. Repressed, but not eliminated. Herein lies, I believe, the essence of the tragedy of modern times. The modern man lives as if Christianity were a negligible hypothesis with no relation to the concrete realities of the world and society. And yet at the bottom of his heart this man remains impregnated with Christianity, so that he lives in a state of perpetual ambivalence with regard to it. — Paul Tournier

What happens then is like what happens when we separate a jigsaw puzzle into its fuve hundred pieces: The over-all picture disappears. This is the state of modern medicine: It has lost the sense of the unity of man. Such is the price it has paid for its scientific progress. It has sacrificed art to science. — Paul Tournier

Many ordinary illnesses are nothing but the expression of a serious dissatisfaction with life. — Paul Tournier

Sickness may be the solemn occasion of God's intervention in a person's life. — Paul Tournier

The experience of being in between-between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bars and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support: it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, or extraordinary aliveness. — Paul Tournier

No one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person. — Paul Tournier

God leads us step by step, from event to event. Only afterward, as we look back over the way we have come and reconsider certain important moments in our lives in the light of all that has followed them, or when we survey the whole progress of our lives, do we experience the feeling of having been led without knowing it, the feeling that God has mysteriously guided us. — Paul Tournier

The price that has to be paid for finding truly personal life is a very high one. It is a price in terms of the acceptance of responsibility. And the awareness of responsibility inevitably leads either to despair or to confession and grace ... What is needed is a new outlook, a personal revolution, a miracle.. It comes by grace, through the encounter with God, through dialogue with him. — Paul Tournier

God's favorites, especially God's favorites, are not immune from the bewildering times when God seems silent. Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either. Faith demands uncertainty, confusion. The Bible includes many proofs of God's concern - some quite spectacular - but no guarantess. A guarantee would, after all, preclude faith. — Paul Tournier

Now, we shall be able to judge the extent of the spiritual undernourishment if we look at all these movements from another angle: not as errors but rather as attempts to find healing. I use this comparison: For a long time medical men combated fever as if it itself constituted the illness. Medicine today inclines rather to respect it, not only as a symptom of the disease but of the struggle of the organism against the disease. True, it is this struggle which makes it ill, and yet this very struggle is also the proof of its vitality and is the necessary way to healing. — Paul Tournier

The really important thing in life is not the avoidance of mistakes, but the obedience of faith. By obedience, the man is led step by step to correct his errors, whereas nothing will ever happen to him if he doesn't get going. — Paul Tournier

Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either. — Paul Tournier

Listen to all the conversations of our world, between nations as well as between individuals. They are, for the most part, dialogues of the deaf. — Paul Tournier

Everything that is worthwhile in life is scary. Choosing a school, choosing a career, getting married, having kids - all those things are scary. If it is not fearful, it is not worthwhile. — Paul Tournier

It is quite clear that between love and understanding there is a very close link ... He who loves understands, and he who understands loves. One who feels understood feels loved, and one who feels loved feels sure of being understood. — Paul Tournier

But in practice, every psychological confession has religious significance, and every religious confession, whether ritual and sacramental or free, its psychological effects. It is perhaps in this fact that we perceive most clearly the unity of the human being, and how impossible it is to dissociate the physical, psychological and religious aspects of his life. Every doctor, even without specializing in psychotherapy, in so far as he has understanding of what is human and likes contact with human beings, may suddenly find himself promoted to a confessor's priesthood without having sought it. — Paul Tournier

That is what marriage really means; helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life. — Paul Tournier

In order to really understand, we need to listen, not reply. We need to listen long and attentively. In order to help anybody to open his heart we have to give him time, asking only a few questions, as carefully as possible in order to help him better explain his experience. — Paul Tournier

Christian faith does not involve repressing one's anxiety in order to appear strong. On the contrary, it means recognizing one's weakness, accepting the inward truth about oneself, confessing one's anxiety, and still to believe, that is to say that the Christian puts his trust not in his own strength, but in the grace of God. — Paul Tournier

To be right is dangerous, it has ever been the source of all intolerance. — Paul Tournier

Our task is to live our personal communion with Christ with such intensity as to make it contagious. — Paul Tournier

If there had been no fear of failure, neither would there be any joy in success. — Paul Tournier

In order to make a success of old age, one must begin it earlier, and not try to postpone it as long as possible. In the middle of life we must stop to think, to organize our existence with an eye to a still distant future, instead of allowing ourselves to be entirely sucked into the professional and social whirl. It is then that it is important to give place little by little to less external activities, less technical and more cultural, which will survive the moment of retirement. — Paul Tournier

People are reluctant to talk about old age and death because they are afraid of emotion, and they willingly avoid the things they feel most emotional about, though these are the very things they most need to talk about. — Paul Tournier

There are two things we cannot do alone. One is to be married and the other is to be a Christian. — Paul Tournier

Life can become once more a grand adventure if we will surrender it to god. He brings one adventure to an end, only to open another to us. With him we must be ready for anything. — Paul Tournier

The real meaning of travel, like that of a conversation by the fireside, is the discovery of oneself through contact with other people, and its condition is self-commitment in the dialogue. — Paul Tournier

Most illnesses do not, as is generally thought, come like a bolt out of the blue. The ground is prepared for years through faulty diet, intemperance, overwork, and moral conflicts, slowly eroding the subject's vitality. — Paul Tournier

The highest sign of friendship is that of giving another the privilege of sharing your inner thought. — Paul Tournier

I am convinced that nine out of every ten persons seeing a psychiatrist do not need one. They need someone who will love them with God's love ... and they will get well. — Paul Tournier

Let us not seek to bring religion to others, but let us endeavor to live it ourselves. — Paul Tournier

The adventurous life is not one exempt from fear, but on the contrary, one that is lived in full knowledge of fears of all kinds, one in which we go forward in spite of our fears. — Paul Tournier

The most tragic consequence of our criticism of a man is to block his way to humiliation and grace, precisely to drive him into the mechanisms of self justification and into his faults instead of freeing him from them. For him, our voice drowns the voice of God. — Paul Tournier

We are always looking for a grand program of action full of great ideas, when the thing is to begin by obeying the little ideas. — Paul Tournier

A man makes himself hard and inflexible in order to escape his guiltiness. The strange paradox present on every page of the Gospels and which we can verify any day, is that it is not guilt which is the obstacle to grace, as moralism supposes. On the contrary, it is the repression of guilt, self-justification, genuine self-righteousness and smugness which is the obstacle. — Paul Tournier

We do not posses God. We find him periodically. — Paul Tournier

I have treated many artists. There are among them many neurotics, so many that one finally comes to believe that one cannot be an artist without being neurotic. Again I found in them that inner conflict which is characteristic of modern man: the conflict between a right intuition (namely, that their vocation has fundamental importance for the destiny of humanity) and a false idea (namely, that art is superfluous luxury). — Paul Tournier

The more refined and subtle our minds, the more vulnerable they are. — Paul Tournier

At the heart of personality is the need to feel a sense of being lovable without having to qualify for that acceptance. — Paul Tournier