Martin Buber Quotes

Martin Buber offers a reflective, spiritual voice that invites you to ponder life, divinity and the self.

67 quotes

1. The Thou encounters me by grace- it cannot be found by seeking. But that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed.

2. The basic word I-Thou can be spoken only with one's whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a Thou to become; becoming I, I say Thou.

3. All actual life is encounter.

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

5. An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.

6. Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.

7. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.

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

9. Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable. And how much weight has all erroneous talk about God's nature and works (although there never has been nor can be any such talk that is not erroneous) compared with the one truth that all men who have addressed God really meant him? For whoever pronounces the word God and really means Thou, addresses, no matter what his delusion, the true Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom he stands in a relationship that includes all others.

10. Whoever abhors the name and fancies that he is godless- when he addresses with his whole devoted being the Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other, he addresses God.

11. Through the Thou a person becomes I.

12. Next to being the children of God our greatest privilege is being the brothers of each other.

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

14. All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

15. Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God- such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is now passing

16. God is the mysterium tremendum that appears and overthrows, but he is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.

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

18. How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you- for that is the meaning of your life.

19. 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.

20. I don't like religion much, and I am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found.

21. Leisure is the exultation of the possible.

22. Power abdicates only under the stress of counter-power.

23. Solitude is the place of purification.

24. One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves. (From Paths in Utopia)

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

26. 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.

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

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

29. The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.

30. The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny. There is a divine meaning of the world, of man, of human persons, of you and me.

31. 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.

32. We can learn to be whole by saying what we mean and doing what we say.

33. 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.

34. When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.

35. Without distance there is no dialogue between the two.

36. The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.

37. Success is not one of the names of God.

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

39. Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived.

40. Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power. ... The great man, whether we comprehend him in the most intense activity of his work or in the restful equipoise of his forces , is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind , the incarnation of the spirit .

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

42. What has to be given up is not the I, as most mystics suppose: this I is indispensable for any relationship, including the highest, which always presupposes an I and You.

43. In the beginning was the relationship.

44. To begin with oneself but not to end with onself. To start from oneself but not to aim at oneself.

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

46. The concept of guilt is found most powerfully developed even in the most primitive communal forms which we know... the man is guilty who violates one of the original laws which dominate the society and which are mostly derived from a divine founder; the boy who is accepted into the tribal community and learns its laws, which bind him thenceforth, learns to promise; this promise is often given under the sign of death, which is symbolically carried out on the boy, with a symbolical rebirth.

47. 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..

48. 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.

49. But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partially of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found?

50. We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.

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

52. God said to Abraham: "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto the land that I will show thee." God says to man: "First, get you out of your country, that means the dimness you have inflicted on yourself. Then out of your birthplace, that means out of the dimness your mother inflicted on you. After that, out of the house of your father, that means out of the dimness your father inflicted on you. Only then will you be able to go to the land that I will show you"

53. From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother. That Christianity has regarded and does regard him as God and Savior has always appeared to me a fact of the highest importance which, for his sake and my own, I must endeavor to understand . . . I am more than ever certain that a great place belongs to him in Israel's history of faith and that this place cannot be described by any of the usual categories.

54. In philosophical anthropology, ... where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature.

55. 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.

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

57. We may listen to our inner self-and still not know which ocean we hear roaring.

58. What is it that is eternal: the primal phenomenon, present in the here and now, of what we call revelation? It is man's emerging from the moment of the supreme encounter, being no longer the same as he was when entering into it.

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

60. Every person born in this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique.

61. When people come to you for help, do not turn them off with pious words, saying, 'Have faith and take your troubles to God.' Act instead as though there were no God, as though there were only one person in the world who could help -- only yourself.

62. The world is a spinning die, and everything turns and changes: man is turned into angel, and angel into man, and the head into the foot, and the foot into the head. Thus all things turn and spin and change, this into that, and that into this, the topmost to the undermost, and the undermost to the topmost. For at the root all is one, and salvation inheres in the change and return of things.

63. In spite of all similarities, every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands of you a reaction that cannot be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you.

64. If you want to raise a man from mud and filth, do not think it is enough to stay on top and reach a helping hand down to him. You must go all the way down yourself, down into mud and filth. Then take hold of him with strong hands and pull him and yourself out into the light.

65. When a man grows aware of a new way in which to serve God, he should carry it around with him secretly, and without uttering it, for nine months, as though he were pregnant with it, and let others know of it only at the end of that time, as though it were a birth.

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

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