Martin Buber Quotes

Feeling one "has"; love occurs.

Let us, cautious in diction, And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully.

He who loves brings God and the World together.

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

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

In the beginning was the relationship.

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

What you must do is love your neighbor as yourself. There is no one who knows your many faults better than you! But you love yourself notwithstanding. And so you must love your neighbor, no matter how many faults you see in him.

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.

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.

You should carefully observe the way toward which your heart draws you, then choose this way with all your strength.

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

The future stands in need of you in order to be born.

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.

Every morning, I shall concern myself anew about the boundary, Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No, And pressing forward honor reality. 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A human being becomes whole not in virtue of a relation to himself [only] but rather in virtue of an authentic relation to another human being(s).

Play is the exultation of the possible.

Real faith means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life and which cannot be comprised in any formula. Real faith means the ability to endure life in the face of this mystery.

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.

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.

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

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

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

When I meet a man, I am not concerned about his opinions. I am concerned about the man.

God made so many different kinds of people; why would God allow only one way to worship?

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.

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

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.

I think no human being can give more than this. Making life possible for the other, if only for a moment.

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?

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

I have learned a new form of service from the wars of Frederick, king of Prussia. It is not necessary to approach the enemy in order to attack him. In fleeing from him, it is possible to circumvent him as he advances and fall on him from the rear and force him to surrender. What is needed is not to strike straight at evil but to withdraw to the sources of divine power, and from there to circle around evil, bend it and transform it into its opposite.

To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin.

I have to tell it again and again: I have no doctrine. I only point out something. I point out reality, I point out something in reality which has not or too little been seen. I take him who listens to me at his hand and lead him to the window. I push open the window and point outside. I have no doctrine, I carry on a dialogue.

As I actualize, I uncover.

Only men who are capable of saying Thou [an attitude of deep respect] to one another can truly say we with one another.

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

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.

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

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