Top 100 Paul Tillich Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.”

— Paul Tillich

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous YES to one’s own true being.”

— Paul Tillich

59. “Our spirituality is the ground of our being.”

— Paul Tillich

60. “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

61. “Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.”

— Paul Tillich

62. “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

63. “Wine is like the incarnation – it is both divine and human.”

— Paul Tillich

64. “The existential attitude is one of involvement in contrast to a merely theoretical or detached attitude. “Existential” in this sense can be defined as participating in a situation, especially a cognitive situation, with the whole of one’s existence.”

— Paul Tillich

65. “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

66. “Nothing truly real is forgotten eternally, because everything real comes from eternity and goes to eternity.”

— Paul Tillich

67. “Ordinary theism has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind. The protest of atheism against such a highest person is correct. There is no evidence for his existence, nor is he a matter of ultimate concern. God is not God without universal participation. “Personal God” is a confusing symbol.”

— Paul Tillich

68. “All things and all people, so to speak, call on us with small or loud voices. They want us to listen. They want us to understand their intrinsic claims, their justice of being. But we can give it to them only through the love that listens.”

— Paul Tillich

69. “Man is able to decide for or against reason, he is able to create beyond reason or to destroy below reason.”

— Paul Tillich

70. “Where there is faith there is an awareness of holiness.”

— Paul Tillich

71. “Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being.”

— Paul Tillich

72. “Wisdom loves the children of men, but she prefers those who come through foolishness to wisdom.”

— Paul Tillich

73. “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

74. “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

75. “Forgiving presupposes remembering.”

— Paul Tillich

76. “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

77. “Love is the infinite which is given to the finite.”

— Paul Tillich

78. “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

79. “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

80. “We must be ourselves, we must decide where to go.”

— Paul Tillich

81. “The basic error of fundamentalism is that it overlooks the contribution of the receptive side in the revelatory situation and consequently identifies one individual and conditioned form of receiving the divine with the divine itself.”

— Paul Tillich

82. “No self-acceptance is possible if one is not accepted in a person-to-person relation.”

— Paul Tillich

83. “In the depth of the anxiety of having to die is the anxiety of being eternally forgotten.”

— Paul Tillich

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

— Paul Tillich

85. “Faith embraces itself and the doubt about itself.”

— Paul Tillich

86. “In the state of despair there is nobody and nothing that accepts. But there is the power of acceptance itself which is experienced. Meaninglessness, as long as it is experienced, includes an experience of the “power of acceptance”. To accept this power of acceptance consciously is the religious answer of absolute faith, of a faith which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be.”

— Paul Tillich

87. “Only if God IS ultimate reality, can he be our unconditional concern; only then can he be the object of surrender, obedience, and assent. Faith in anything which has only preliminary reality is idolatrous.”

— Paul Tillich

88. “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

89. “The affirmation of one’s essential being in spite of desires and anxieties creates joy.”

— Paul Tillich

90. “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

91. “He who participates in God participates in eternity.”

— Paul Tillich

92. “Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern.”

— Paul Tillich

93. “For encountering God means encountering transcendent security and transcendent eternity.”

— Paul Tillich

94. “Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it.”

— Paul Tillich

95. “He who is grasped by the one thing that is needed has the many things under his feet. They concern him but not ultimately, and when he loses them he does not lose the one thing he needs and that cannot be taken from him.”

— Paul Tillich

96. “If my tongue were trained to measures, I would sing a stirring song.”

— Paul Tillich

97. “Man is essentially ‘finite freedom’; freedom not in the sense of indeterminacy but in the sense of being able to determine himself through decisions in the center of his being. Man, as finite freedom, is free within the contingencies of his finitude. But within these limits he is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become, to fulfill his destiny.”

— Paul Tillich

98. “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

99. “Man is not what he believes himself to be in his conscious decisions.”

— Paul Tillich

100. “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