Paul Tournier famous quotes

Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can.
-- Paul Tournier

#Confidence #Sports #Motivation

Acceptance of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.
-- Paul Tournier

#Life #Change #Running

Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either.
-- Paul Tournier

#Opportunity #Doubt

Our task is to live our personal communion with Christ with such intensity as to make it contagious.
-- Paul Tournier

#Tasks #Christ #Intensity

I am convinced that nine out of every ten persons seeing a psychiatrist do not need one. They need someone who will love them with God's love...and they will get well.
-- Paul Tournier

#Get Well #Nine #Needs

That is what marriage really means; helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life.
-- Paul Tournier

#Love #Marriage #Running

God leads us step by step, from event to event. Only afterward, as we look back over the way we have come and reconsider certain important moments in our lives in the light of all that has followed them, or when we survey the whole progress of our lives, do we experience the feeling of having been led without knowing it, the feeling that God has mysteriously guided us.
-- Paul Tournier

#Knowing #Light #Feelings

Everything that is worthwhile in life is scary. Choosing a school, choosing a career, getting married, having kids - all those things are scary. If it is not fearful, it is not worthwhile.
-- Paul Tournier

#School #Kids #Careers

Many ordinary illnesses are nothing but the expression of a serious dissatisfaction with life.
-- Paul Tournier

#Expression #Serious #Ordinary

There are two things we cannot do alone. One is to be married and the other is to be a Christian.
-- Paul Tournier

#Christian #Two #Married

The really important thing in life is not the avoidance of mistakes, but the obedience of faith. By obedience, the man is led step by step to correct his errors, whereas nothing will ever happen to him if he doesn't get going.
-- Paul Tournier

#Mistake #Men #Errors

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

#Our World #Deaf #Individual

At the heart of personality is the need to feel a sense of being lovable without having to qualify for that acceptance.
-- Paul Tournier

#Heart #Acceptance #Personality

Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.
-- Paul Tournier

#Love #Dream #Lonely

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

#Block #Men #Self

The price that has to be paid for finding truly personal life is a very high one. It is a price in terms of the acceptance of responsibility. And the awareness of responsibility inevitably leads either to despair or to confession and grace... What is needed is a new outlook, a personal revolution, a miracle.. It comes by grace, through the encounter with God, through dialogue with him.
-- Paul Tournier

#Responsibility #Acceptance #Miracle

In order to really understand, we need to listen, not reply. We need to listen long and attentively. In order to help anybody to open his heart we have to give him time, asking only a few questions, as carefully as possible in order to help him better explain his experience.
-- Paul Tournier

#Heart #Order #Giving

We are always looking for a grand program of action full of great ideas, when the thing is to begin by obeying the little ideas.
-- Paul Tournier

#Motivation #Ideas #Littles

Life can become once more a grand adventure if we will surrender it to god. He brings one adventure to an end, only to open another to us. With him we must be ready for anything.
-- Paul Tournier

#Faith #Adventure #Surrender

Your manner of life now is already determining your life in those years of old age and retirement, without your realizing it even, and perhaps without your giving enough thought to it. One must therefore prepare oneself for retirement.
-- Paul Tournier

#Retirement #Years #Giving

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

#Understanding #Links #Feels

No one can develop freely in this world and find a full life without feeling understood by at least one person.
-- Paul Tournier

#Feelings #Understanding #World

Recounting of a life story, a mind thinking aloud leads one inevitably to the consideration of problems which are no longer psychological but spiritual.
-- Paul Tournier

#Spiritual #Thinking #Mind

Sickness may be the solemn occasion of God's intervention in a person's life.
-- Paul Tournier

#May #Medical #Sickness

The worst thing is not being wrong, but being sure one is not wrong.
-- Paul Tournier

#Worst #Being Wrong

The more refined and subtle our minds, the more vulnerable they are.
-- Paul Tournier

#Mind #Vulnerable #Subtle

The experience of being in between-between the time we leave home and arrive at our destination; between the time we leave adolescence and arrive at adulthood; between the time we leave doubt and arrive at faith. It is like the time when a trapeze artist lets go the bars and hangs in midair, ready to catch another support: it is a time of danger, of expectation, of uncertainty, of excitement, or extraordinary aliveness.
-- Paul Tournier

#Letting Go #Home #Artist

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

#Doubt #Suffering #Mystery

Let us not seek to bring religion to others, but let us endeavor to live it ourselves.
-- Paul Tournier

#Endeavor

The adventurous life is not one exempt from fear, but on the contrary, one that is lived in full knowledge of fears of all kinds, one in which we go forward in spite of our fears.
-- Paul Tournier

#Inspirational #Kind #Life Is

If there had been no fear of failure, neither would there be any joy in success.
-- Paul Tournier

#Joy #No Fear #Fear Of Failure

What happens then is like what happens when we separate a jigsaw puzzle into its fuve hundred pieces: The over-all picture disappears. This is the state of modern medicine: It has lost the sense of the unity of man. Such is the price it has paid for its scientific progress. It has sacrificed art to science.
-- Paul Tournier

#Art #Men #Jigsaw Puzzles

To be right is dangerous, it has ever been the source of all intolerance.
-- Paul Tournier

#Intolerance #Source #Dangerous