Paul Tillich Quotes
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There is no truth without the form of truth, namely justice.
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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.
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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.
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Without the eros toward truth, theology would not exist.
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He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.
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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.
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Philosophy asks the question of reality as a whole; it asks the question of the structure of being. And it answers in terms of categories, structural laws, and universal concepts.
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The object of theology is what concerns us ultimately. Only those propositions are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of ultimate concern for us.
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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.
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Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free.
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Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.
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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.
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The courage to be as oneself within the atmosphere of Enlightenment is the courage to affirm oneself as a bridge from a lower to a higher state of rationality. It is obvious that this kind of courage to be must become conformist the moment its revolutionary attack on that which contradicts reason has ceased, namely in the victorious bourgeoisie.
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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.
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Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.
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Boredom is rage spread thin.
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Astonishment is the root of philosophy.
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Against Pascal I say: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the God of the philosophers is the same God. He is a person and the negation of himself as a person. Faith comprises both itself and the doubt of itself. The Christ is Jesus and the negation of Jesus.
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Knowledge of that which concerns us infinitely is possible only in an attitude of infinite concern.
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Even loneliness is not absolute loneliness because the contents of the universe are in him.
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At the end of ancient civilization ontic anxiety is predominant, at the end of the Middle Ages moral anxiety, and at the end of the modern period spiritual anxiety.
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Plato … teaches the separation of the human soul from its 'home' in the realm of pure essences. Man is estranged from what he essentially is. His existence in a transitory world contradicts his essential participation in the eternal world of ideas.
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Man is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become to fulfill his destiny.
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The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the universe.