Martin Buber Quotes

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

“All actual life is encounter.”

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

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

“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?”

“Creation does not merely take place once in the beginning but also at every moment throughout the whole of time.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Play is the exultation of the possible.”

“Solitude is the place of purification.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“Through the Thou a person becomes I.”

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

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

“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.”

“When I was young, I admired people who were clever. Now that I am old, I admire people who are kind.”

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

“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.”

“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.”