Tillich Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. Is no love which does not become help, taught the theologian Paul Tillich.)

Elizabeth Gilbert

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. Paul Tillich, for example, maintained that, 'It is as atheistic to affirm the existence of God as it is to deny it.'4

Lloyd Geering

#7. Theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich characterizes anxiety into three categories: "ontic anxiety" is the fear of fate and death. The second is "moral anxiety," from guilt, or condemnation. The third is "spiritual anxiety," prompted by an empty life, without direction or meaning.

Caitlin Moran

#8. As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

David Brooks

#9. Faith embraces itself and the doubt about itself.

Paul Tillich

#10. 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

#11. Culture (science) is the form of religion; Religion is the substance of culture (science).

Paul Tillich

#12. 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

#13. Courage is a greater virtue than love. At best, it takes courage to love.

Paul Tillich

#14. 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

#15. The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.

Paul Tillich

#16. Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, revolt against the objectified world has determined the character of art and literature.

Paul Tillich

#17. 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

#18. Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being

Paul Tillich

#19. Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous YES to one's own true being.

Paul Tillich

#20. 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

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

Paul Tillich

#22. One cannot be strong without love. For love is not an irrelevant emotion; it is the blood of life.

Paul Tillich

#23. Love is the infinite which is given to the finite.

Paul Tillich

#24. 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

#25. ...sin is separation.

Paul Tillich

#26. 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

#27. Man is not what he believes himself to be in his conscious decisions.

Paul Tillich

#28. Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge.

Paul Tillich

#29. Every institution is inherently demonic.

Paul Tillich

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. There is no love which does not become help.

Paul Tillich

#33. Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern.

Paul Tillich

#34. The typical American, after he has lost the foundations of his existence, works for new foundations

Paul Tillich

#35. Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned.

Paul Tillich

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

Paul Tillich

#37. If my tongue were trained to measures, I would sing a stirring song.

Paul Tillich

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. The courage to die is the test of the courage to be.

Paul Tillich

#41. Real joy is a "severe matter"; it is the happiness of a soul which is "lifted above every circumstance.

Paul Tillich

#42. The separation of faith and love is always a consequence of a deterioration of religion.

Paul Tillich

#43. Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.

Paul Tillich

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

Paul Tillich

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. Wine is like the incarnation
it is both divine and human

Paul Tillich

#51. 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

#52. Man is able to decide for or against reason, he is able to create beyond reason or to destroy below reason

Paul Tillich

#53. 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

#54. Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.

Paul Tillich

#55. Fear is the absence of faith.

Paul Tillich

#56. The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.

Paul Tillich

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

Paul Tillich

#58. For love ... is the blood of life, the power of reunion in the separated.

Paul Tillich

#59. 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

#60. For encountering God means encountering transcendent security and transcendent eternity.

Paul Tillich

#61. Wisdom loves the children of men, but she prefers those who come through foolishness to wisdom.

Paul Tillich

#62. The first duty of love is to listen.

Paul Tillich

#63. Man creates what he is.

Paul Tillich

#64. Nothing truly real is forgotten eternally, because everything real comes from eternity and goes to eternity.

Paul Tillich

#65. The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.

Paul Tillich

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

Paul Tillich

#67. 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

#68. He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.

Paul Tillich

#69. Man is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become to fulfill his destiny.

Paul Tillich

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him.

Paul Tillich

#73. We must be ourselves, we must decide where to go.

Paul Tillich

#74. Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith

Paul Tillich

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

Paul Tillich

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

Paul Tillich

#77. Reason is the presupposition of faith, and faith is the fulfillment of reason.

Paul Tillich

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

Paul Tillich

#79. 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

#80. He who participates in God participates in eternity.

Paul Tillich

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

Paul Tillich

#82. Truth without the way to truth is dead.

Paul Tillich

#83. Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.

Paul Tillich

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

Paul Tillich

#85. Astonishment is the root of philosophy.

Paul Tillich

#86. Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.

Paul Tillich

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

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

Paul Tillich

#93. 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

#94. There is no condition for forgiveness.

Paul Tillich

#95. Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves.

Paul Tillich

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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