Tillich Quotes & Sayings

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

In fact, even Tillich's socialism was accommodationist because it continued the Constantinian strategy: The way to make the church radical is by identifying the church with secular "radicals", that is, socialists. — Stanley Hauerwas

Reason is the presupposition of faith, and faith is the fulfillment of reason. — Paul Tillich

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no condition for forgiveness. — Paul Tillich

In those who rest on their unshakable faith, pharisaism and fanaticism are the unmistakable symptoms of doubt which has been repressed. Doubt is not overcome by repression but by courage. Courage does not deny that there is doubt, but it takes the doubt into itself as an expression of its own finitude and affirms the content of an ultimate concern. Courage does not need the safety of an unquestionable conviction. It includes the risk without which no creative life is possible. — Paul Tillich

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

I'd like to turn the whole Jesus story around and look at it from a different vantage point, to consider that he was a human being who achieved such promise of humanity that he entered into what I think God is: mainly, the power of life, the power of love and what Paul Tillich, a German theologian of the mid-twentieth century, called "the ground of all being." — John Shelby Spong

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

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

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

Boredom is rage spread thin — Paul Tillich

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

I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and to borrow a phrase from the theologian, Paul Tillich, as the Ground of being, calling me to be all that I can be. — John Shelby Spong

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

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

Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge. — Paul Tillich

Ordinary theism has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind. The protest of atheism against such a highest person is correct. There is no evidence for his existence, nor is he a matter of ultimate concern. God is not God without universal participation. "Personal God" is a confusing symbol. — Paul Tillich

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

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

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 - Loneliness & Solitude: "And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain to pray: and when the evening was come, he was alone" - Matthew 14.23.
'He was there alone.' So are we. Man [humankind] is alone because he/[she] is man [human]. In some way every creature is alone ... Loneliness can be conqured only by those who can bear solitude (1973:15 & 20).
To overcome 'our' sense of aloness is a life long pursuite - let us not despair in its pursuite! — Paul Tillich

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

Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous YES to one's own true being. — Paul Tillich

Culture (science) is the form of religion; Religion is the substance of culture (science). — Paul Tillich

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

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

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

Man lives 'in' meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, religiously. The most fundamental expression of this fact is the language which gives man the power to abstract from the concretely given and, after having abstracted from it, to return to it, to interpret and transform it. The most vital being is the being which has the word and is by the word liberated from bondage to the given. — Paul Tillich

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

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

And so we use them for a kind of pleasure which can be called "fun." But it is not the creative kind of fun often connected with play; it is, rather, a shallow, distracting, greedy way of "having fun." And it is not by chance that it is that type of fun which can easily be commercialized, for it is dependent on calculable reactions, without passion, without risk, without love. Of all the dangers that threaten our civilization, this is one of the most dangerous ones: the escape from one's emptiness through a "fun" which makes joy impossible. — Paul Tillich

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

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

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

For love ... is the blood of life, the power of reunion in the separated. — Paul Tillich

Wine is like the incarnation
it is both divine and human — Paul Tillich

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

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

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

Genuine forgiveness is participation, reunion overcoming the powers of estrangement ... We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love. — Paul Tillich

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

Faith consists in being vitally concerned with that ultimate reality to which I give the symbolical name of God. Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith. — Paul Tillich

The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that "loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude." Because the borderline finds solitude so difficult to tolerate, she is trapped in a relentless metaphysical loneliness from which the the only relief comes from of the physical presence of others. So she will often rush to singles bars or with crowded haunts, often with disappointing--or even violent--results. — Jerold J. Kreisman

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

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

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

...sin is separation. — Paul Tillich

The fatal pedagogical error is to throw answers like stones at the heads of those who have not yet asked the questions. — Paul Tillich

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

The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. — Paul Tillich

Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest. Martin Luther King Jr. was among the civil rights pioneers who took an interest. While working on his philosophy of non-violent resistance, he read Sartre, Heidegger and the German-American existentialist theologian Paul Tillich. — Sarah Bakewell

Man creates what he is. — Paul Tillich

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

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

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

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

I loved thee beautiful and kind, And plighted an eternal vow; So altered are thy face and mind, t'were perjury to love thee now! — Paul Tillich

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

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

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

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

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

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

But freedom is the possibility of a total and centered act of the personality, an act in which all the drives and influences which constitute the destiny of man are brought into the centered unity of a decision. — Paul Tillich

Faith as the state of being ultimately concerned implies love, namely, the desire and urge toward the reunion of the seperated. — Paul Tillich

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

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

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

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

Out of the element of participation follows the certainty of faith; out of the element of separation follows the doubt in faith. And each is essential for the nature of faith. Sometimes certainty conquers doubt, but it cannot eliminate doubt. The conquered of today may become the conqueror of tomorrow. Sometimes doubt conquers faith, but it still contains faith. Otherwise it would be indifference. — Paul Tillich

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

The thing is," I say to Paul Tillich, in my head, "the thing is, Paul, that ultimately, I don't think my anxiety is ontic, moral, or spiritual." I look at him. "At the end of it all, I just need some money, Paul," I say. Paul Tillich nods. If I were rich, none of this would matter. I just need some money. — Caitlin Moran

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

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

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

Fear is the absence of faith. — Paul Tillich

We must abandon the external height images in which the theistic God has historically been perceived and replace them with internal depth images of a deity who is not apart from us, but who is the very core and ground of all that is. - Paul Tillich — Diana Butler Bass

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

Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by, and turned to, the infinite. — Paul Tillich

The character of human life, like the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, the true and false, the creative and destructive forces-both individual and social. — Paul Tillich

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

Our search for such [moral] principles can start with ... the unconditional imperative to acknowledge every person as a person. If we ask for the contents given by this absolute, we find, first, something negative-the command not to treat a person as a thing. This seems little, but it is much. It is the core of the principle of justice. — Paul Tillich

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

Every person, every place and every action is qualified by this association with the unconditional; it penetrates every moment of daily life and sanctifies it: "The Universe is God's sanctuary. Every work day is a day of the Lord, every supper is a Lord's supper, every work a fulfillment of the divine task, every joy a joy in God. In all preliminary concerns, ultimate concern is present, consecrating them." — Paul Tillich

You go after crude, rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than sophisticated theologians like Tillich or Bonhoeffer who teach the sort of religion I believe in. — Richard Dawkins

The neurotic is aware of the danger of a situation in which his unrealistic self-affirmation is broken down and no realistic self-affirmation takes its place. — Paul Tillich

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

As Donald Trump was campaigning for the Republican nomination for president in 2016 he was asked, "Have you ever asked God for forgiveness?" He replied, "I'm not sure I have. I just go and try and do a better job from there. . . . If I do something wrong, I think I just try to make it right. I don't bring God into that picture. I don't."1 He created quite a stir among many religious people, so he tempered the comments a few days later. But I think he was being honest, and his comments reflect the way many people feel: in theory they believe in the forgiveness of sins, but the concept doesn't really apply to them. Standing in stark contrast to this view is one articulated by twentieth-century existentialist theologian Paul Tillich, who once said, "Forgiveness is an answer, the divine answer, to the question implied in our existence."2 — Adam Hamilton

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

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

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

There is no love which does not become help. — Paul Tillich

The abundance of a grateful heart gives honor to God even if it does not turn to Him in words. An unbeliever who is filled with thanks for his very being has ceased to be an unbeliever. — Paul Tillich

Every institution is inherently demonic. — Paul Tillich