Martin Buber Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

He who desires to become aware of the hidden light must lift the feeling of fear up to its source. And he can accomplish this if he judges himself and all he does. For then he sheds all fears and lifts fear that has fallen down. But if he does not judge himself, he will be judged from on high, and this judgment will come upon him in the guise of countless things, and all the things in the world will become messengers of God who carry out the judgment on this man. — Martin Buber

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

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

Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons. — Martin Buber

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

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

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. — Martin Buber

Solitude is the place of purification. — Martin Buber

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

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. — Martin Buber

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

But a person, I would say, is an individual living really with the world. And 'with' the world, I don't mean in the world- just in real contact, in real reciprocity with the world in all the points in which the world can meet man. — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

Religion means goal and way, politics implies end and means. The political end is recognizable by the fact that it may be attained
in success
and its attainment is historically recorded. The religious goal remains, even in man's highest experiences, that which simply provides direction on the mortal way; it never enters into historical consummation. — Martin Buber

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

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

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

When you spread forth your hands, I hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers, I no longer listen; your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;
cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.
Is that too little? — Martin Buber

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Martin Buber

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

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

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

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

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

Feeling one "has"; love occurs. — Martin Buber

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

That you need God more than anything, you know at all times in your heart. But don't you know also that God needs you - in the fullness of his eternity, you? 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 which is the meaning of your life. — Martin Buber

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

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 . — Martin Buber

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

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

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

If you cannot get across it, you must get across it, nevertheless. — Martin Buber

A story must be told in such a way that it constitutes help in itself. My grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a story about his teacher. And he related how his teacher used to hop and dance while he prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he was so swept away by his story that he began to hop and dance to show how the master had done. From that hour he was cured of his lameness. That's how to tell a story. — Martin Buber

As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and the whirl of doom congeals.
The human being to whom I say You I do not experience. But i stand in relation to him, in the sacred basic word. Only when I step out of this do I experience him again. Experience is remoteness from You. — Martin Buber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Martin Buber

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

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

Without being and remaining oneself, there is no love. — 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

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

He who loves brings God and the World together. — Martin Buber

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

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

The philosophical anthropologist ... can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer. — Martin Buber

Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or great teachers. They save men from confusion and hard choices. They offer a single choice that is easy to make because those who do not take the path that is commended to them live a wretched life. To walk far on this path may be difficult, but the choice is easy, and to hear the celebration of this path is pleasant. Wisdom offers simple schemes, but truth is not so simple. — Martin Buber

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

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

Power abdicates only under stress of counter-power. — Martin Buber

One should hallow all that one does in one's natural life. One eats in holiness, tastes the taste of food in holiness, and the table becomes an altar. One works in holiness, and raises up the sparks which hide themselves in all tools. One walks in holiness across the fields, and the soft songs of all herbs, which they voice to God, enter into the song of our soul. — Martin Buber

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

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. — 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

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

The Divine may come to life in individual man, may reveal itself from within individual man; but it attains its earthly fullness only where, having awakened to an awareness of their universal being, individual beings open themselves to one another, disclose themselves to one another, help one another; where immediacy is established between one human being and another; where the sublime stronghold of the individual is unbolted, and man breaks free to meet other man. Where this takes place, where the eternal rises in the Between, the seemingly empty space: that true place of realization is community, and true community is that relationship in which the Divine comes to its realization between man and man. These — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

One cannot divide one's life between an actual relationship to God and an inactual I-It relationship to the world - praying to God in truth and utilizing the world. Whoever knows the world as something to be utilized knows God the same way. His prayers are a way of unburdening himself - and fall into the ears of the void. — Martin Buber

That I discovered the deed that intends me, that, this movement of my freedom, reveals the mystery to me. But this, too, that I cannot accomplish it the way I intended it, this resistance also reveals the mystery to me. He that forgets all being caused as he decides from the depths, he that puts aside possessions and cloak and steps bare before the countenance
this free human being encounters fate as the counter-image of his freedom. It is not his limit but his completion; freedom and fate embrace each other to form meaning; and given meaning, fate
with its eyes, hitherto severe, suddenly full of light
looks like grace itself. — Martin Buber

In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself. — Martin Buber

Spirit in its human manifestation is man's response to his You. Man speaks in many tongues - tongues of language, of art, of action - but the spirit is one; it is response to the You that appears from the mystery and addresses us from the mystery. Spirit is word. And even as verbal speech may first become word in the brain of man and then become sound in his throat, although both are merely refractions of the true event because in truth language does not reside in man but man stands in language and speaks out of it - so it is with all words, all spirit. Spirit is not in the I but between I and You. It is not like the blood that circulates in you but like the air in which you breathe. Man lives in the spirit when he is able to respond to his You. He is able to do that when he enters into this relation with his whole being. It is solely by virtue of his power to relate that man is able to live in the spirit. — Martin Buber

All real living is meeting. — Martin Buber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About what mainly constituted what you ask, it was something other. It was just a certain inclination to meet people. And as far as possible, to change something in the other, but also to let me be changed by him. At any event, I had no resistance, I put no resistance to it. I already began as a young man. I felt I have not the right to want to change another if I am not open to be changed by him as far as it is legitimate. — Martin Buber

Man is like a tree. If you stand in front of a tree and watch it incessantly, to see how it grows, and to see how much it has grown, you will see nothing at all. But tend it at all times, prune the runners and keep it free of beetles and worms, and all in good time-it will come into its growth. It is the same with man: all that is necessary is for him to overcome his obstacles, and he will thrive and grow. But it is not right to examine him hour after hour to see how much has already been added to his stature. — Martin Buber

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

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). — Martin Buber

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

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

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

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

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

We say 'far away'; the Zulu has for that a word which means, in our sentence form, 'There where someone cries out: "Oh mother, I am lost." ' The Fuegian soars above our analytic wisdom with a seven-syllabled word whose precise making is, 'They stare at one another, each waiting for the other to volunteer to do what both wish, but are not able to do. — Martin Buber

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

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

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

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

And how shall we be able to tell whether he is a true zaddik?" The Baal Shem replied. "Ask him to advise you what to do to keep unholy thoughts from disturbing you in your prayers and studies. If he gives you advice, then you will know that he belongs to those who are of no account. For this is the service of men in the world to the very hour of their death; to struggle time after time with the extraneous, and time after time to uplift and fit it into the nature of the Divine Name. — Martin Buber