Paul Tillich Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
Theology cannot rest on scientific theory. But it must relate its understanding of man to an understanding of universal nature, for man is a part of nature and statements about nature underlie every statement about him.

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

Paul Tillich
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
Life remains ambiguous as long as there is life. The question implied in the ambiguities of life derives to a new question, namely, that of the direction in which life moves. This is the question of history. Systematically speaking, history, characterized as it as by its direction

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

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

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

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
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness.... 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
Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by, and turned to, the infinite.

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

Paul Tillich
The question now arises: What is the content of our ultimate concern? What does concern us unconditionally? The answer, obviously, cannot be a special object, not even God, for the first criterion of theology must remain formal and general. If more is to be said about the nature of our ultimate concern, it must be derived from an analysis of the concept ultimate concern. Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being. Only those statements are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us.

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
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 is able to decide for or against reason, he is able to create beyond reason or to destroy below reason

Paul Tillich
Against Pascal I say: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God of the philosophers is the same God. He is a person and the negation of himself as a person.
Faith comprises both itself and the doubt of itself. The Christ is Jesus and the negation of Jesus.

Paul Tillich
The second element in absolute faith is the dependence of the experience of nonbeing on the experience on being and the dependence of the experience of meaninglessness on the experience of meaning. even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible.

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

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

Paul Tillich