Paul Tillich Quotes

I think there will always be a possibility that God doesn't exist because He is infinitude and into that infinitude must come that possibility.

In God alone, essence (what He is) and existence (that he is) coincide.

The One, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, these are what we call the transcendental attributes of Being, because they surpass all the limits of essences and are coextensive with Being.

It's hard to say, 'I don't believe in God.' I would love to know if God exists. But it's a very difficult thing for me to believe.

If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. ...But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion.

Existence is prior to essence.

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

If God did not exist, he would have to be invented.

Tell me," said the atheist , "Is there a God really?" Said the master, "If you want me to be perfectly honest with you, I will not answer." Later the disciples demanded to know why he had not answered. "Because the question is unanswerable," said the Master. "So you are an atheist?" "Certainly not. The atheist makes the mistake of denying that of which nothing may be said... and the theist makes the mistake of affirming it.

If there is no God, then I am God.

God is not all that exists. God is all that does not exist.

God is that, the greater than which cannot be conceived.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

I'm constantly reading books on God or the absence of God and atheism.

Existence precedes and rules essence.

Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.

To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.

I am one who believes that the world goes from the slime to the sublime. And you can take Darwin and all your philosophers and all your ontologists, and that's the direction.

We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.

Being is the great explainer.

If there be an infinite Being, he does not need our help - we need not waste our energies in his defense.

The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.

Man is the being whose project it is to be God.

What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one.