Quotes About Spirituality

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

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

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.

sin is separation.

He who participates in God participates in eternity.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Self-affirmation, for Tillich, is the paradox of "participation in something which transcends the self" (165).

God] is the name for that which concerns man ultimately. This does not mean that first there is a being called God and then the demand that man should be ultimately concerned about him. It means that whatever concerns a man ultimately becomes god for him, and, conversely, it means that a man can be concerned ultimately only about that which is god for him.

The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. (190)

Le courage d'être s'enracine dans le Dieu qui apparaît quand Dieu a disparu dans l'angoisse du doute.

Spiritual self-affirmation occurs in every moment in which man lives creatively in the various spheres of meaning.

God is always revived in something or somebody; He cannot be murdered. The story of every atheism is the same.

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

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

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

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

The question our century puts before us is: is it possible to regain the lost dimension, the encounter with the Holy, the dimension which cuts through the world of subjectivity and objectivity and goes down to that which is not world but is the Mystery of the Ground of Being.