Paul Tillich Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

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
Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being.

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

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 man's total being. They all are united in the act of faith. But faith is not the sum total of their impacts. It transcends every special impact as well as the totality of them and it has itself a decisive impact on each of them.

Paul Tillich
The weakness of the fanatic is that those whom he fights have a secret hold upon him; and to this weakness he and his group finally succumb.

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

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
Man and nature belong together in their created glory – in their tragedy and in their salvation.

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
Now the way into the profounder levels of life is not to be found by means of physical and psychological analysis but only by means of intuitive insight, of apprehension on the basis of one's own aliveness.

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
Why does philosophy use concepts and why does faith use symbols if both try to express the same ultimate? The answer, of course, is that the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful.

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
Man is infinitely concerned about the infinity to which he belongs, from which he is separated, and for which he is longing. Man is totally concerned about the totality which is his true being and which is disrupted in time and space. Man is unconditionally concerned about that which conditions his being beyond all the conditions in him and around him. Man is ultimately concerned about that which determines his ultimate destiny beyond all preliminary necessities and accidents.

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.

Paul Tillich
As Hegel called the place at the end of philosophy the "place of truth," so Marx thought that the proletariat occupies this favored position, and the psychoanalyst attributes it to the completely analyzed personality, and the philosopher of vitalism to the strongest life, to the process of growth, to an élite or a race. There are, according to these ideas, favored moments and positions in history when truth appears and reason is united with the irrational. There are moments, as I myself have emphasized on different occasions, in which "kairos," the right time, is united with "logos," the "eternal truth," and in which the fate of philosophy is decided for a special period.

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

Paul Tillich
History has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines.

Paul Tillich
Even loneliness is not absolute loneliness because the contents of the universe are in him.

Paul Tillich
In order to know what is just in a person-to-person encounter, love listens. It is its first task to listen. No human relation, especially no intimate one, is possible without mutual listening.

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
What is the end of all the magnificent means provided by the productive activity of American society? Have not the means swallowed the ends, and does not the unrestricted production of means indicate the absence of ends? Even many born Americans are today inclined to answer the last question affirmatively. But there is more involved in the production of means. It is not the tools and gadgets that are the telos, the inner aim of production; it is the production itself. The means are more than means; they are felt as creations, as symbols of the infinite possibilities implied in man's productivity. Being-itself is essentially productive.

Paul Tillich
There is no truth without the form of truth, namely justice.

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