Paul Tillich - Love Quotes

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

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
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
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 Great Commandment demands of everyone the total love of God and the love one's neighbour according to the measure of man's natural self-affirmation. If love is emotion, how can it be demanded? Emotions cannot be demanded. We cannot demand them of ourselves. If we try, something artificial is produced which shows the traits of what had to be suppressed in its production. Repentance, intentionally produced, hides self-complacency in perversion. Love, intentionally produced, shows indifference or hostility in perversion. The means: love as an emotion cannot be commanded. Either love is something other than emotion or the Great Commandment is meaningless.

Paul Tillich