Martin Buber Quotes

Solitude is the place of purification.

Because we cannot circle above all existence – sleepless, unbroken, boundless, glowing – we content ourselves with being submerged and awakening .

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.

"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." — Martin Buber as quoted in Narrative Means for Sober Ends, by Jon Diamond, p.78

Avoid melancholy with all your might. It hurts the service of God more than sin. Satan takes less pleasure in sin than in a man's melancholy over having sinned again and so feeling that he is a slave to sin. Thus the Evil One has caught the poor soul in the net of despair.

When we see a great man desiring power instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more precisely that his attitude to his work is sick. He overreaches himself, the work denies itself to him, the incarnation of the spirit no longer takes place, and to avoid the threat of senselessness he snatches after empty power. This sickness casts the genius on to the same level as those hysterical figures who, being by nature without power, slave for power, in order that they may enjoy the illusion that they are inwardly powerful, and who in this striving for power cannot let a pause intervene, since a pause would bring with it the possibility of self-reflection and self-reflection would bring collapse.

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.

True unity cannot be found, it can only be created. He who creates it realizes the unity of the world in the unity of his soul. Thus beforehand he must live through the tension of the world in his soul as his own soul's tension.

God ... desires His creature to be able to oppose Him. He has given that creature freedom. ... When man turns away from evil with that whole measure of power with which he is able to rebel against God, then he has truly turned to God.

The realer religion is, so much the more it means its own overcoming. It wills to cease to be the special domain "Religion" and wills to become life. It is concerned in the end not with specific religious acts, but with redemption from all that is specific.

All actual life is encounter.

Through the Thou a person becomes I.

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.

This is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of danger and of risk, of eternal beginning and eternal becoming, of opened spirit and of deep realization, the kingdom of holy insecurity.

Thus the poet is the messenger of God and of the earth and is at home in the two spheres. The force of fire is his force; it burns in contradiction, and it shines in unity. Like Enoch, of whom a legend tells that he was transformed from flesh to fire; his bones are glowing coals, but his eyelashes are the splendor of the firmament.