Top 100 Buber Quotes
#1. 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.
Martin Buber
#2. 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.
Martin Buber
#3. Martin Buber said, 'All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.
Frances Mayes
#4. Martin Buber said he sensed a rising hunger for relatedness Men would no longer rise in rebellion merely against one oppressor or another but against the distortion of a great yearning, 'the effort towards community.'
Marilyn Ferguson
#5. The differences between Buber and Hegel far outnumber their similarities. But they are at one in their opposition to any otherworldliness, in their insistence on finding in the present whatever beauty and redemption there may be, and in their refusal to pin their hopes on any beyond.
Martin Buber
#6. Martin Buber suggested that evil prevailed because of the inability of man to imagine the real. Yet human beings do have that capacity. Lord Byron, a poet favored by Alfred Nobel, captured the stark essence of a post-nuclear world in his poem Darkness:
Bernard Lown
#8. To begin with oneself but not to end with onself. To start from oneself but not to aim at oneself.
Martin Buber
#9. 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.
Martin Buber
#10. The perfection of any matter, the highest or the lowest, touches on the divine.
Martin Buber
#11. I'm not sure I can take your advice. You are dealing with English Gentlemen. We are dealing with monsters.
Martin Buber
#12. 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.
Martin Buber
#13. A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for.
Martin Buber
#14. Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return.
Martin Buber
#15. 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.
Martin Buber
#16. 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.
Martin Buber
#17. All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
Martin Buber
#18. If a person kills a tree before its time, it is like having murdered a soul.-Rabbi Nachman
Martin Buber
#19. There is no room for God in him who is full of himself.
Martin Buber
#20. I think no human being can give more than this. Making life possible for the other, if only for a moment.
Martin Buber
#21. Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveller is unaware.
Martin Buber
#22. 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
Martin Buber
#23. 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
#24. So long as you "have" yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things.
Martin Buber
#25. On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish.
Martin Buber
#26. Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.
Martin Buber
#27. As long as love is "blind" - that is, as long as it does not see a whole being - it does not yet truly stand under the basic word of relation. Hatred remains blind by its very nature; one can hate only part of a being.
Martin Buber
#28. 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.
Martin Buber
#29. Freedom and destiny are solemnly promised to one another and linked together in meaning.
Martin Buber
#30. 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.
Martin Buber
#32. 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
#33. 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.
Martin Buber
#34. Feelings are 'entertained'; love comes to pass. Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love.
Martin Buber
#36. There is something that can be found in one place. It is a great treasure which may be called the fulfillment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place where one stands
Martin Buber
#37. 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.
Martin Buber
#39. The beating heart of the universe is holy joy.
Martin Buber
#40. 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
#41. 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.
Martin Buber
#42. One need ask only 'What for? What am I to unify my being for?' The reply is: Not for my own sake.
Martin Buber
#43. To him who knows how to read the legend, it conveys more truth than the chronicle.
Martin Buber
#44. 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.
Martin Buber
#45. I shall teach you the best way to say Torah. You must cease to be aware of yourselves. You must be nothing but an ear that hears what the universe of the word is constantly saying within you. The moment you start hearing what you yourself are saying, YOU must stop.
Martin Buber
#46. When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.
Martin Buber
#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..
Martin Buber
#48. To produce is to draw forth, to invent is to find, to shape is to discover ...
Martin Buber
#49. The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes.
Martin Buber
#50. The prophet is appointed to oppose the kind, and even more: history.
Martin Buber
#51. Everything depends on inner change; when this has taken place, then, and only then does the world change.
Martin Buber
#52. He who loves brings God and the World together.
Martin Buber
#54. 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.
Martin Buber
#55. We may listen to our inner self-and still not know which ocean we hear roaring.
Martin Buber
#56. 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.
Martin Buber
#57. Our relationships live in the space between us which is sacred.
Martin Buber
#58. 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
Martin Buber
#59. To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin.
Martin Buber
#60. 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.
Martin Buber
#61. The tradition of the camp fire faces that of the pyramid.
Martin Buber
#62. 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.
Martin Buber
#63. For Judaism, God is not a Kantian idea but an elementally present spiritual reality - neither something conceived by pure reason nor something postulated by practical reason, but emanating from the immediacy of existence as such, which religious man steadfastly confronts and nonreligious man evades.
Martin Buber
#64. We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.
Martin Buber
#66. 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
#67.
What, then, does one experience of the You?
Nothing at all. For one does not experience it.
What, then, does one know of the You?
Only everything. For one no longer knows particulars.
Martin Buber
#69. One must be truly able to say I in order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth.
Martin Buber
#70. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.
Martin Buber
#71. To love God truly, one must first love man. And if anyone tells you that he loves God and does not love his fellow-man, you will know that he is lying.
Martin Buber
#72. The historical religions have the tendency to become ends in themselves, and, as it were, to put themselves in God's place, and, in fact, there is nothing that is so apt to obscure God's face as a religion.
Martin Buber
#73. There is a hierarchy of deceptions. Near the bottom of the ladder is journalism: a steady stream of irresponsible distortions that most people find refreshing although on the morning after, or at least within a week, it will be stale and flat.
Martin Buber
#74. 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.
Martin Buber
#75. 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.
Martin Buber
#76. 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
#77. The fact that every people feel itself threatened by the others gives the state it's definite unifying powers; it depends upon the instinct of self-preservation of society itself; the latent external crisis enables it to get the upper hand in internal crises
Martin Buber
#78. 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.
Martin Buber
#80. The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.
Martin Buber
#81. Meet the world with the fullness of your being, and you shall meet God. Of you wish to believe, love.
Martin Buber
#82. 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
#83. If you cannot get across it, you must get across it, nevertheless.
Martin Buber
#84. The I of the basic word I-Thou is different from that of the basic word I-It.
Martin Buber
#86. Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself.
Martin Buber
#87. 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.
Martin Buber
#88. 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.
Martin Buber
#89. Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.
Martin Buber
#90. We can learn to be whole by saying what we mean and doing what we say.
Martin Buber
#91. 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
#92. Everything is full of sacramental substance, everything. Each thing and each function is ever ready to light up into a sacrament.
Martin Buber
#93. I don't like religion much, and I am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found.
Martin Buber
#94. What has to be given up is not the I, but that drive for self-affirmation which impels man to flee from the unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous world of relation into the having of things.
Martin Buber
#95. Human life and humanity come into being in genuine encounters. The hope for this hour depends upon the renewal of the immediacy of dialogue among human beings.
Martin Buber
#96. Without being and remaining oneself, there is no love.
Martin Buber
#97. If a man wishes to guide the people in his house the right way, he must not grow angry at them. For anger does not only make one's soul impure; it transfers impurity to the souls of those with whom one is angry.
Martin Buber
#98. 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.
Martin Buber
#99. When I meet a man, I am not concerned about his opinions. I am concerned about the man.
Martin Buber
#100. This is the sacrifice: the endless possibility that is offered up on the altar of the form ...
Martin Buber
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