Martin Buber Quotes

Feeling one "has"; love occurs.

The tradition of the camp fire faces that of the pyramid.

We should also pray for the wicked among the peoples of the world; we should love them too.

All actual life is encounter.

Everything is full of sacramental substance, everything. Each thing and each function is ever ready to light up into a sacrament.

A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for.

One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves.

Meet the world with the fullness of your being, and you shall meet God. Of you wish to believe, love.

Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.

The perpetual enemy of faith in the true God is not atheism (the claim that there is no God), but rather Gnosticism (the claim that God is known).

All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.

If we had the power over the ends of the earth, it would not give us that fulfillment of existence which a quiet devoted relationship to nearby life can give us.

Power abdicates only under the stress of counter-power.

The I of the basic word I-Thou is different from that of the basic word I-It.

This is the sacrifice: the endless possibility that is offered up on the altar of the form.

Dialogic is not to be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, the love remaining with itself - this is called Lucifer.

Through the Thou a person becomes I.

Without being and remaining oneself, there is no love.

No limits are set to the ascent of man, and to each and everyone the highest stands open. Here it is only your personal choice that decides.

Creation happens to us, burns into us, changes us, we tremble and swoon, we submit. Creation - we participate in it, we encounter the creator, offer ourselves to him, helpers and companions.

Play is the exultation of the possible.

It pains me to speak of God in the third person.

I'm not sure I can take your advice. You are dealing with English Gentlemen. We are dealing with monsters.

The work produced is a thing among things, able to be experienced and described as a sum of qualities. But from time to time it can face the receptive beholder in its whole embodied form.

One must be truly able to say I in order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth.

To produce is to draw forth, to invent is to find, to shape is to discover.

One need ask only 'What for? What am I to unify my being for?' The reply is: Not for my own sake.

There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less common than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion. But rarest of all is a passionable spirit.

Freedom and destiny are solemnly promised to one another and linked together in meaning.

To him who knows how to read the legend, it conveys more truth than the chronicle.

For sin is just this, what man cannot by its very nature do with his whole being; it is possible to silence the conflict in the soul, but it is not possible to uproot it

The ones who count are those persons who - though they may be of little renown - respond to and are responsible for the continuation of the living spirit.

God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being and with the quality peculiar to human beings.

The perfection of any matter, the highest or the lowest, touches on the divine.

The salvation of man does not lie in his holding himself far removed from the worldly, but in consecrating it to holy, to divine meaning.

The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes.

It is usual to think of good and evil as two poles, two opposite directions, the antithesis of one another...We must begin by doing away with this convention.

I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me.

This is the risk: the primary word can only be spoken with the whole being. He who gives himself to it may withhold nothing of himself.

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.

God cannot be seen, but He can listened to and spoken to!

As I actualize, I uncover.

Read the Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar, as though it had not been set before you ready-made. Face the book with a new attitude as something new.

It is not the nature of the task, but its consecration, that is the vital thing.

Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return.

If a person kills a tree before its time, it is like having murdered a soul.-Rabbi Nachman

One who truly meets the world goes out also to God.

Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself.

The prophet is appointed to oppose the kind, and even more: history.

To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.