The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.

Paul Tillich developed the idea of “the courage to be” in the early Cold War period, when existential anxiety, guilt, and feelings of meaninglessness were prominent themes in European and American intellectual life. A German Protestant theologian who had witnessed World War I, opposed Nazism, and emigrated to the United States in 1933, Tillich sought to translate Christian theology into categories that spoke to modern psychological and philosophical concerns. The line comes from his sustained argument that courage is not mere bravado but an existential act: affirming one’s being in the face of nonbeing (death, guilt, emptiness) and the experience of estrangement from oneself and others.

Tillich defines courage as self-affirmation under conditions that threaten to negate the self. To “accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable” points to the human experience of guilt, inadequacy, and alienation: we recognize aspects of ourselves that fail our own standards or those of society. Yet authentic courage is not achieved by denying this condition; it consists in acknowledging it and still saying “yes” to one’s existence. In Tillich’s theological frame, such self-acceptance is ultimately grounded in a deeper acceptance—what he elsewhere calls being accepted despite being unacceptable—linking existential honesty with grace rather than self-justification.