Martin Buber quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Martin Buber

Martin Buber Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Martin Buber on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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.

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.

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

The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one's whole being. The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one's whole being.

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

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

Play is the exultation of the possible.

Nothing so tends to mask the face of God as religion; it can be a substitute for God himself.

The beating heart of the universe is holy joy.

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

Through the Thou a person becomes I.

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).

The true meaning of love one's neighbor is not that it is a command from God which we are to fulfill, but that through it and in it we meet God.

Power abdicates only under stress of counter-power.

He who loves brings God and the World together.

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

Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.

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

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

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

Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveller is unaware.

Without being and remaining oneself, there is no love.

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

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

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

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

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

All real living is meeting.

If you cannot get across it, you must get across it, nevertheless.

For God does not want to be believed in, to be debated and defended by us, but simply to be realized through us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was from Buber's other writings that I learned what could also be found in I and Thou: the central commandment to make the secular sacred.

And if there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision.

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.

Everyone has in him something precious that is in no one else.

Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.

Rabbi Heshel said: "A man should be like a vessel that willingly receives what its owner pours into it, whether it be wine or vinegar.

In the beginning was the relationship.

On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish.

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

The only possible relationship with God is to address him and to be addressed by him, here and now - or, as Buber puts it, in the present.

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

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

Solitude is the place of purification.

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

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

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

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

Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation.

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

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feelings are 'entertained'; love comes to pass. Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love.

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.

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

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.

In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally don't know how to read them.

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

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

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

True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is lived in the past.

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

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

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.

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

Feeling one "has"; love occurs.

Everything depends on inner change; when this has taken place, then, and only then does the world change.

Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.

Our relationships live in the space between us which is sacred.

What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Men prefer to forget how many possibilities are open to them.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

So long as you "have" yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things.

As I actualize, I uncover.

There is no room for God in him who is full of himself.

Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling - the equality of all lovers..

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

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

All actual life is encounter.