Quotes from Paul Tillich

Love that cares, listens.

There is no love which does not become help.

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 the meaning of our life.

We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love.

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

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

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.

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

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."

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

The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of non-being, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.

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

Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned.

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

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

the courage to die is the test of the courage to be.

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

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

only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.

sin is separation.

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.

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

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

He who participates in God participates in eternity.