Quotes from Paul Tillich

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

We must be ourselves, we must decide where to go.

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.

Reason is the presupposition of faith, and faith is the fulfillment of reason.

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

He who participates in God participates in eternity.

Man creates what he is.

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

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.