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

On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish.

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.

One must, however, take care not to understand this conversation with God — the conversation of which I have to speak in this book and in almost all the works which followed — as something happening solely alongside or above the everyday. God's speech to men penetrates what happens in the life of each one of us, and all that happens in the world around us, biographical and historical, and makes it for you and me into instruction, message, demand. Happening upon happening, situation upon situation, are enabled and empowered by the personal speech of God to demand of the human person that he take his stand and make his decision. Often enough we think there is nothing to hear, but long before we have ourselves put wax in our ears.
(Postscript, October 1957)