Paul Tillich Quotes

You make yourself what you are. You have control of your own destiny.

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

The word 'fate' doesn't really mean much to me in some ways. I think we make our own.

In a larger sense, we all write our own destiny.

You were not born a winner, and you were not born a loser. You are what you make yourself be.

A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

Our ideal of the future is that she should continue to render that service of her own free will.

Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.

I've always felt that life is a novel, and part of it is written for you, and part of it is written by you. It's up to you to write the ending, ultimately.

It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives.

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.

Man is made or unmade by himself. By the right choice he ascends. As a being of power, intelligence, and love, and the lord of his own thoughts, he holds the key to every situation.

My most earnest prayer is that every man and every woman will get it into his or her heart that they are in very deed the architects of their lives.

There's a flipside to this; if you as an individual have the right to live on your own terms, you must have the right to both succeed and fail on them.

We are what we make.

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap.

I willed myself into being.

Trump doesn't define my destiny, only I do and the Lord above.

Sometimes people ask me, 'Are you an optimist or a pessimist?' It doesn't matter. Whether I have a future or not is for me to decide.

I'm living proof that you can create your own life.

Your life will be what you create it as, and no one will stand in judgment of it, now or ever.

We are creators, and yet we naively play the role of "the created." We see ourselves as helpless sheep buffeted around by the God who made us. We kneel like frightened children, begging for help, for forgiveness, for good luck. But once we realize that we are truly created in the Creator's image, we will start to understand that we, too, must be Creators. When we understand this fact, the doors will burst wide open for human potential.

It's not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.