Quotes from Paul Tillich

Man creates what he is.

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

Man lives 'in' meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, religiously. The most fundamental expression of this fact is the language which gives man the power to abstract from the concretely given and, after having abstracted from it, to return to it, to interpret and transform it. The most vital being is the being which has the word and is by the word liberated from bondage to the given.

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

Reasoning as a limited cognitive function, detached from the personal center, never could create courage. One cannot remove anxiety by arguing it away.

Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith

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.

For encountering God means encountering transcendent security and transcendent eternity.

the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable…. This is the genuine meaning of the Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of 'justification by faith

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.

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.

Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge.

Truth without the way to truth is dead.

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.

It is most important for the practice of the Christian ministry, especially in its missionary activities toward those both within and without the Christian culture, to consider pagans, humanists, and Jews as members of the latent Spiritual Community and not as complete strangers who are invited into the Spiritual Community from outside. This insight serves as a powerful weapon against ecclesiastical and hierarchical arrogance.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

The gratitude of those who receive help is first and always gratitude for love and only afterwards gratitude for help.

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

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.