Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Tillich

Tillich drags “faith” out of the realm of private opinion and plants it in the body, where it feels less like certainty and more like being seized. The grammar does the work: faith isn’t a possession (“I have faith”) but an event (“an act”) that happens to a finite creature when something infinite gets its hands on them. That passive punch - “grasped by” - smuggles in Tillich’s signature move: God isn’t a manageable object among objects, but the depth-dimension that interrupts our normal control fantasies. You don’t so much choose faith the way you choose a worldview; you find yourself reoriented, pulled off-axis.

The subtext is anti-sentimental and anti-transactional. Tillich is refusing the cozy modern idea that faith is mainly reassurance or moral good behavior. He’s also refusing the fundamentalist framing of faith as intellectual assent to propositions. “Turned to” suggests conversion as direction, not dogma: a change in what you center your life around. Finite beings can’t climb their way to the infinite; the infinite bends toward them, and the result is a re-aiming.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of world wars, mass politics, and the collapse of old certainties, Tillich treats anxiety as the baseline condition of modernity. His answer isn’t escapist confidence but “ultimate concern”: the courage to commit amid uncertainty, because what calls you is larger than your ego, your nation, your era. The line works because it dignifies human limits while insisting that limits aren’t the last word.