Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.
Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.
The first duty of love is to listen.
The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.
Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.
Wine is like the incarnation--it is both divine and human
Boredom is rage spread thin
...history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines.
Nothing truly real is forgotten eternally, because everything real comes from eternity and goes to eternity.
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.
Astonishment is the root of philosophy.
Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being
Man is free, in so far as he has the power of contradicting himself and his essential nature. Man is free even from his freedom; that is, he can surrender his humanity
There is no place to which we could flee from God, which is outside of God.
I hope for the day when everyone can speak of God without embarrassment.
The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements - as well as one's deepest failures - is a definite symptom of maturity.
Faith as the state of being ultimately concerned implies love, namely, the desire and urge toward the reunion of the seperated.
Language has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.
The separation of faith and love is always a consequence of a deterioration of religion.
Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous YES to one's own true being.
The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.
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 passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.
Man is able to decide for or against reason, he is able to create beyond reason or to destroy below reason
In the courageous standing of uncertainty, faith shows most visibly its dynamic character.
Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it.
...only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.
Reason is the presupposition of faith, and faith is the fulfillment of reason.
Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is one element of faith
...sin is separation.
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.
The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.
The courage to die is the test of the courage to be.
Truth without the way to truth is dead.
The typical American, after he has lost the foundations of his existence, works for new foundations
Man creates what he is.
Real joy is a “severe matter”; it is the happiness of a soul which is “lifted above every circumstance.
Man is the question he asks about himself, before any question has been formulated. It is, therefore, not surprising that the basic questions were formulated very early in the history of mankind.
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
He who participates in God participates in eternity.
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.
