Buber Quotes & Sayings

When we rise out of [the night] into the new life and there begin to receive the signs, what can we know of that which - of him who gives them to us? Only what we experience from time to time from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God. — 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

But since the time of Leibnitz, it is hard to find philosophers who stress relatedness in any way. There is Henri Bergson, and before him the romantics, and Marx with his talk of the brotherhood of revolution, and Martin Buber with his I and Thou, but by and large modern philosophy is about aloneness. We are forlorn, abandoned. — Stuart Miller

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

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

Marriage, for instance, will never be given new life except by that out of which true marriage always arises, the revealing by two people of the Thou to one another. Out of this a marriage is built up by the Thou that is neither of the I's. This is the metaphysical and metapsychical factor of love to which feelings of love are mere accompaniments. — Martin Buber

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

The beating heart of the universe is holy joy. — 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 it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It ... Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself. — 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

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 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 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

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

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

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

All actual life is encounter. — Martin Buber

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

The third (sphere in which the world of relation arises): Life with spiritual beings.
Here the relations is wrapped in a cloud but reveals itself, it lacks but creates language. We hear no You and yet addressed; we answer - creating, thinking, acting: with our being we speak the basic word, unable to say You with our mouth.
Bt how can we incorporate into the world of the basic word that lies outside language? — Martin Buber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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" — Martin Buber

Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor, but the actual truth. Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its " content," its object; but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses. — Martin Buber

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

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

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

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

Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists - that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education. Because this human being exists, meaninglessness, however hard pressed you are by it, cannot be the real truth. Because this human being exists, in the darkness the light lies hidden, in fear salvation, and in the callousness of one's fellow-men the great Love. — Martin Buber

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

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

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

I do not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolutes, but on a narrow, rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but [only] the certainty of meeting what remains, undisclosed. — 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

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

Here is the infallible test. Imagine yourself in a situation where you are alone, wholly alone on earth, and you are offered one of the two, books or men. I often hear men prizing their solitude but that is only because there are still men somewhere on earth even though in the far distance. I knew nothing of books when I came forth from the womb of my mother, and I shall die without books, with another human hand in my own. 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 being looking at me. — Martin Buber

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

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a paradox here! Kierkegaard's own indirect communication proposes that we start with the experience of those who don't believe and meet them on their own ground. His success in doing this is evidenced by the fact that, at least for some periods of the 20th century, aspects of his work became a major focus for radical thinkers of various kinds, including the non-religious and, interestingly, a significant number of Jewish thinkers (Buber, Rosenzweig, Taubes, and others). — George Pattison

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. — Martin Buber

In the beginning was the relationship. — 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

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

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

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 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

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

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

The tradition of the camp fire faces that of the pyramid. — Martin Buber

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

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

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

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

The biblical passage which says of Abraham and the three visiting angels: "And He stood over them under the tree and they did eat" is interpreted by Rabbi Zusya to the effect that man stands above the angels, because he knows something unknown to them, namely, that eating may be hallowed by the eater's intention ... Any natural act, if hallowed, leads to God, and nature needs man for what no angel can perform on it, namely, its hallowing. — Martin Buber

Martin Buber as described for basic virtues cultivated by the Hasidim to overcome the separation of the sacred and secular. . . . St. Benedict spoke of them as truly seeking God, zeal for a humble way of life, zeal for obedience, and zeal for the opus of God. Buber catalogues them as kavana (single-mindedness), shiflut (humility), avada (service), and hitlahavut (fire of ecstasy). 129 — M. Basil Pennington

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

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