Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Paul Tillich, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Paul Tillich quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 113 Paul Tillich quotes for you to read and share.
Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. -- 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
Truth without the way to truth is dead. -- 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
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
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
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
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
Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude. -- 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
The typical American, after he has lost the foundations of his existence, works for new foundations -- Paul Tillich
Love is the infinite which is given to the finite. -- Paul Tillich
He who participates in God participates in eternity. -- Paul Tillich
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
The first duty of love is to listen. -- Paul Tillich
Man is not what he believes himself to be in his conscious decisions. -- 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 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
Reason is the presupposition of faith, and faith is the fulfillment of reason. -- 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
He who knows about depth knows about God. -- 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
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
We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea. -- 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
Wisdom loves the children of men, but she prefers those who come through foolishness to wisdom. -- 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 place to which we could flee from God, which is outside of God. -- Paul Tillich
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
The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning. -- Paul Tillich
For encountering God means encountering transcendent security and transcendent eternity. -- Paul Tillich
Courage is a greater virtue than love. At best, it takes courage to love. -- Paul Tillich
Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous YES to one's own true being. -- Paul Tillich
Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone. -- Paul Tillich
Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of man's being alone. It has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone. -- Paul Tillich
He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole 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
Man is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become to fulfill his destiny. -- Paul Tillich
The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority. -- Paul Tillich
Real joy is a "severe matter"; it is the happiness of a soul which is "lifted above every circumstance. -- Paul Tillich
Astonishment is the root of philosophy. -- 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
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
For love ... is the blood of life, the power of reunion in the separated. -- 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
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
God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him. -- 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
Our spirituality is the ground of our being. -- Paul Tillich
Every institution is inherently demonic. -- Paul Tillich
Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern. -- Paul Tillich
In the courageous standing of uncertainty, faith shows most visibly its dynamic character. -- Paul Tillich
Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it.
-- Paul Tillich
The separation of faith and love is always a consequence of a deterioration of religion. -- Paul Tillich
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
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
Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate. -- Paul Tillich
The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. -- Paul Tillich
There is no love which does not become help. -- Paul Tillich
Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves. -- Paul Tillich
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
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
Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. -- Paul Tillich
The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of non-being, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself. -- 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
One cannot be strong without love. For love is not an irrelevant emotion; it is the blood of life. -- Paul Tillich
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
In the depth of the anxiety of having to die is the anxiety of being eternally forgotten. -- Paul Tillich
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
Fear is the absence of faith. -- Paul Tillich
The basic error of fundamentalism is that it overlooks the contribution of the receptive side in the revelatory situation and consequently identifies one individual and conditioned form of receiving the divine with the divine itself. -- Paul Tillich
The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. -- Paul Tillich
Where there is faith there is an awareness of holiness. -- Paul Tillich
Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being -- 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
Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free. -- Paul Tillich
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
Faith as the state of being ultimately concerned implies love, namely, the desire and urge toward the reunion of the seperated. -- 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
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
Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful. -- Paul Tillich
Faith embraces itself and the doubt about itself. -- Paul Tillich
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
Nothing truly real is forgotten eternally, because everything real comes from eternity and goes to eternity. -- Paul Tillich
I hope for the day when everyone can speak of God without embarrassment. -- Paul Tillich
The courage to die is the test of the courage to be. -- Paul Tillich
Culture (science) is the form of religion; Religion is the substance of culture (science). -- Paul Tillich
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
All things and all people, so to speak, call on us with small or loud voices. They want us to listen. They want us to understand their intrinsic claims, their justice of being. But we can give it to them only through the love that listens. -- Paul Tillich
History has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines. -- 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
We must be ourselves, we must decide where to go. -- Paul Tillich
Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers. -- 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
Man creates what he is. -- 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
Wine is like the incarnation
it is both divine and human -- Paul Tillich
Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith -- Paul Tillich
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
The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the universe . -- Paul Tillich
There is no condition for forgiveness. -- 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
Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge. -- Paul Tillich
...sin is separation. -- Paul Tillich
Being human means asking the questions of one's own being and living under the impact of the answers given to this question. And, conversely, being human means receiving answers to the questions of one's own being and asking questions under the impact of the answers. -- Paul Tillich
If my tongue were trained to measures, I would sing a stirring song. -- Paul Tillich
Boredom is rage spread thin -- Paul Tillich
Love that cares, listens. -- Paul Tillich
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
Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by, and turned to, the infinite. -- Paul Tillich
The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable. -- Paul Tillich
Theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundations and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received. -- Paul Tillich
