Quotes from Paul Tillich

"You are accepted!" ... accepted by that which is greater than you and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask the name now, perhaps you will know it later. Do not try to do anything, perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything, do not perform anything, do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.

But if it is life alone that dies, love is born, which is the innermost part of the spirit. It is the most mature and most precious fruit of the life that sacrifices itself. Love breaks out of the prison of individualism and nationalist stupidity. Love goes to another person, even one with a different language or of a different race, and returns from him richer.

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

Theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundations and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Neither the Ten Commandments nor the great commandment is revelatory if separated from the divine covenant with Israel or from the presence of the Kingdom of God in the Christ. These commandments were meant and should be taken as interpretations of a new reality, not as orders directed against the old reality. They are descriptions and not laws. ~ vol. 1, p.125

Love is the infinite which is given to the finite.