Paul Tillich

“There is no love which does not become help.”

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

“Faith includes both an immediate awareness of something unconditional and the courage to take the risk of uncertainty upon itself. Faith says "Yes" in spite of the anxiety of "No."Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality”

“Boredom is rage spread thin.”

“Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being.”

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

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

“Faith as the state of being ultimately concerned implies love, namely, the desire and urge toward the reunion of the seperated.”

“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 awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.”

“Decision is a risk rooted in the courage of being free.”

“Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.”

“He who risks and fails can be forgiven. He who never risks and never fails is a failure in his whole being.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The first duty of love is to listen.”

“Faith…is a concern of the whole person; it is the most personal concern, and that which determines all others. …it is not something which we can produce by the will to believe, but that by which we are grasped.”

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