Martin Buber > Quotes

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
― Martin Buber

“An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.”
― Martin Buber

“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”
― Martin Buber

“The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.”
― Martin Buber

“The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.”
― Martin Buber

“We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.”
― Martin Buber

“I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience. ”
― Martin Buber

“Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.”
― Martin Buber

“All real living is meeting.”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou

“We cannot avoid using power, cannot escape the compulsion to afflict the world, so let us, cautious in diction and mighty in contradiction, love powerfully.”
― Martin Buber

“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.”
― Martin Buber

“Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?”
― Martin Buber

“This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul's creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being..”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou

“There are three principles in a man's being and life:
The principle of thought, the principle of speech,
and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict
between me and my fellow-men is that I do not
say what I mean and I don't do what I say.”
― Martin Buber

“Solitude is the place of purification.”
― Martin Buber

“Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other….
Secretly and bashfully he watches for a YES which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.
”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou

“And if there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision. ”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou

“When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.”
― Martin Buber

“Every person born into the world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique....If there had been someone like her in the world, there would have been no need for her to be born." --Martin Buber as quoted in Narrative Means for Sober Ends, by Jon Diamond, p.78”
― Martin Buber

“Every man's foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved.”
― Martin Buber

“All actual life is encounter.”
― Martin Buber

“Play is the exultation of the possible.”
― Martin Buber

“Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived.”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou

“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.”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou

“If I had been asked in my early youth whether I preferred to have dealings only with men or only with books, my answer would certainly have been in favor of books. In later years this has become less and less the case. Not that I have had so much better experiences with men than with books; on the contrary, purely delightful books even now come my way more often than purely delightful men. But the many bad experiences with men have nourished the meadow of my life as the noblest book could not do, and the good experiences have made the earth into a garden for me.

[…:]

Here is an infallible test. Imagine yourself in a situation where you are alone, wholly alone on earth, and you are offered one of the two, books or men. I often hear men prizing their solitude, but that is only because there are still men somewhere on earth, even though in the far distance. I knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. 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 being looking at me.”
― Martin Buber, Meetings

“Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor, but the actual truth. Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its " content," its object; but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses.”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou

“Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling - the equality of all lovers..”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou

“You can rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way-- it will always be muck. Have I sinned or have I not sinned? In the time I am brooding over it, I could be stringing pearls for the delight of Heaven”
― Martin Buber

“For God does not want to be believed in, to be debated and defended by us, but simply to be realized through us.”
― Martin Buber, On Judaism

“No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou