Top 100 Paul Tillich Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.”

— Paul Tillich

Featured in: Doubt Quotes

2. “The first duty of love is to listen.”

— Paul Tillich

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

— Paul Tillich

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

— Paul Tillich

5. “Fear is the absence of faith.”

— Paul Tillich

6. “Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free.”

— Paul Tillich

7. “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”

— Paul Tillich

8. “The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.”

— Paul Tillich

9. “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

10. “The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.”

— Paul Tillich

11. “Courage is a greater virtue than love. At best, it takes courage to love.”

— Paul Tillich

12. “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

13. “Faith is an act of a finite being who is grasped by, and turned to, the infinite.”

— Paul Tillich

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

— Paul Tillich

15. “Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.”

— Paul Tillich

16. “Accept the fact that you are accepted, despite the fact that you are unacceptable.”

— Paul Tillich

17. “Boredom is rage spread thin.”

— Paul Tillich

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

— Paul Tillich

19. “There is no love which does not become help.”

— Paul Tillich

20. “One cannot be strong without love. For love is not an irrelevant emotion; it is the blood of life.”

— Paul Tillich

21. “He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.”

— Paul Tillich

22. “Man’s ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.”

— Paul Tillich

23. “Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge.”

— Paul Tillich

24. “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

25. “He who knows about depth knows about God.”

— Paul Tillich

26. “The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.”

— Paul Tillich

27. “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

28. “Every institution is inherently demonic.”

— Paul Tillich

29. “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

30. “Parents need to listen as much to their kids as they do to them: “The first duty of love is to listen.””

— Paul Tillich

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Man is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become to fulfill his destiny.”

— Paul Tillich

34. “The separation of faith and love is always a consequence of a deterioration of religion.”

— Paul Tillich

35. “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

36. “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

37. “Faith as the state of being ultimately concerned implies love, namely, the desire and urge toward the reunion of the separated.”

— Paul Tillich

38. “There is no condition for forgiveness.”

— Paul Tillich

39. “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

40. “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

41. “Astonishment is the root of philosophy.”

— Paul Tillich

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

— Paul Tillich

43. “Man creates what he is.”

— Paul Tillich

44. “Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves.”

— Paul Tillich

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

— Paul Tillich

46. “Philosophy deals with the structure of being in itself; theology deals with the meaning of being for us.”

— Paul Tillich

47. “Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.”

— Paul Tillich

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

— Paul Tillich

49. “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness.”

— Paul Tillich

50. “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