Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Tillich

Tillich slips a provocation into a sentence that sounds, at first pass, like inspirational piety. “Man is asked” is the tell: the self isn’t sovereign here. The human project begins as a summons, not a lifestyle choice. That passive construction also matters because it leaves the question of the caller hanging in the air. God, conscience, history, the “ground of being” Tillich famously preferred to a more cartoonish deity - the ambiguity is deliberate. It forces the reader to feel responsibility without immediately outsourcing it to a simple, comforting image of authority.

The line stages a tension between given-ness and becoming. “Make of himself what he is supposed to become” implies a blueprint, a telos, but not an automatic one. Destiny is not a prewritten script; it’s a demand that must be enacted. Tillich’s subtext is anti-complacent: you don’t discover your authentic self by introspection alone, and you don’t arrive by accident. You are “supposed” to become something, and the moral pressure of that word pushes back against modern fantasies of infinite self-invention.

Context sharpens the edge. Tillich wrote in the shadow of two world wars and the collapse of European certainties; he also watched nationalism and mass politics offer counterfeit destinies. Read that way, “fulfill his destiny” isn’t a cheap heroic arc. It’s a warning that freedom is not weightless. If humans refuse the hard work of becoming - courage, discipline, accountability - they will accept easier destinies supplied by tribes, ideologies, or fear. Tillich’s sentence works because it makes “destiny” feel less like fate and more like an ethical appointment you can still miss.