Paul Tournier > Quotes

“It is quite clear that between love and understanding there is a very close link...He who loves understands, and he who understands loves. One who feels understood feels loved, and one who feels loved feels sure of being understood.”
― Paul Tournier, To Understand Each Other

“Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.”
― Paul Tournier

“Listen to all the conversations of our world, between nations as well as between individuals. They are, for the most part, dialogues of the deaf.”
― Paul Tournier

“Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either.”
― Paul Tournier

“We are nearly always longing for an easy religion, easy to understand and easy to follow; a religion with no mystery, no insoluble problems,no snags; a religion that would allow us to escape from our miserable human condition; a religion in which contact with God spares us all strife, all uncertainty,all suffering and all doubt; in short, a religion without a cross”
― Paul Tournier

“I have treated many artists. There are among them many neurotics, so many that one finally comes to believe that one cannot be an artist without being neurotic. Again I found in them that inner conflict which is characteristic of modern man: the conflict between a right intuition (namely, that their vocation has fundamental importance for the destiny of humanity) and a false idea (namely, that art is superfluous luxury).”
― Paul Tournier, The Whole Person in a Broken World

“We do not posses God. We find him periodically.”
― Paul Tournier

“The most tragic consequence of our criticism of a man is to block his way to humiliation and grace, precisely to drive him into the mechanisms of self justification and into his faults instead of freeing him from them. For him, our voice drowns the voice of God.”
― Paul Tournier

“Disgusted by the abuses to which it led, humanity repressed Christianity by which it had so long been dominated. Repressed, but not eliminated. Herein lies, I believe, the essence of the tragedy of modern times. The modern man lives as if Christianity were a negligible hypothesis with no relation to the concrete realities of the world and society. And yet at the bottom of his heart this man remains impregnated with Christianity, so that he lives in a state of perpetual ambivalence with regard to it.”
― Paul Tournier, The Whole Person in a Broken World

“Now, we shall be able to judge the extent of the spiritual undernourishment if we look at all these movements from another angle: not as errors but rather as attempts to find healing. I use this comparison: For a long time medical men combated fever as if it itself constituted the illness. Medicine today inclines rather to respect it, not only as a symptom of the disease but of the struggle of the organism against the disease. True, it is this struggle which makes it ill, and yet this very struggle is also the proof of its vitality and is the necessary way to healing.”
― Paul Tournier, The Whole Person in a Broken World

“But in practice, every psychological confession has religious significance, and every religious confession, whether ritual and sacramental or free, its psychological effects. It is perhaps in this fact that we perceive most clearly the unity of the human being, and how impossible it is to dissociate the physical, psychological and religious aspects of his life. Every doctor, even without specializing in psychotherapy, in so far as he has understanding of what is human and likes contact with human beings, may suddenly find himself promoted to a confessor's priesthood without having sought it.”
― Paul Tournier, Guilt and Grace

“A man makes himself hard and inflexible in order to escape his guiltiness. The strange paradox present on every page of the Gospels and which we can verify any day, is that it is not guilt which is the obstacle to grace, as moralism supposes. On the contrary, it is the repression of guilt, self-justification, genuine self-righteousness and smugness which is the obstacle.”
― Paul Tournier, Guilt and Grace

“In order to console, there is no need to say much. It is enough to listen, to understand, to love.”
― Paul Tournier

“Óvakodjunk attól, nehogy megfosszuk Istent emberségétől annak ürügyén, hogy megszabaduljunk a gyermeteg antropomorfizmustól, hogy aztán ne maradjon nekünk más, mint egy távoli, rideg, az örökkévalóságból kimozdíthatatlan Isten, aki nem ismeri az életet, a történelmet, az emberi egzisztenciát, aki a filozófusok, és nem a Biblia élő Istene. Ha szabad így fogalmaznunk, az indulatoktól mentes Isten lélek nélküli, halott Isten, aki a Nietzschéénél is halottabb. (...) A harag nélküli Isten ugyanakkor szánalom nélküli Isten.”
― Paul Tournier, Igaz ​és hamis bűntudat