Martin Buber
An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.Collection: Great
The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.Collection: Love
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.Collection: Travel
Through the Thou a person becomes I.
Solitude is the place of purification.
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.
Play is the exultation of the possible.
A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for.
To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin.
The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes.
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.
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.
When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Neighbor
Every person born in this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique.Collection: Unique
Everything depends on inner change; when this has taken place, then, and only then does the world change.Collection: Taken
A human being becomes whole not in virtue of a relation to himself [only] but rather in virtue of an authentic relation to another human being(s).Collection: Virtue
The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.Collection: Education
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Knowledge
In spite of all similarities, every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands of you a reaction that cannot be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Humanity
The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.Collection: Atheist
Our relationships live in the space between us which is sacred.Collection: Relationship
I think no human being can give more than this. Making life possible for the other, if only for a moment.Collection: Thinking
He who loves brings God and the World together.Collection: Together
Real faith means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life and which cannot be comprised in any formula. Real faith means the ability to endure life in the face of this mystery.Collection: Real
All real living is meeting.Collection: Life And Love
God dwells wherever man lets Him in.Collection: Men
Since the primary motive of the evil is disguise, one of the places evil people are most likely to be found is within the church. What better way to conceal one's evil from oneself, as well as from others, than to be a deacon or some other highly visible form of Christian within our culture? ... I do not mean to imply that the evil are anything other than a small minority among the religious or that the religious motives of most people are in any way spurious. I mean only that evil people tend to gravitate toward piety for the disguise and concealment it can offer them.Collection: Christian
You should carefully observe the way toward which your heart draws you, then choose this way with all your strength.Collection: Heart
All actual life is encounter.Collection: Empathy
We can learn to be whole by saying what we mean and doing what we say.Collection: Learning
Nothing so tends to mask the face of God as religion; it can be a substitute for God himself.Collection: Faces
Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.Collection: Way
So long as you "have" yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Thinking
Everything is full of sacramental substance, everything. Each thing and each function is ever ready to light up into a sacrament.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Love
The beating heart of the universe is holy joy.Collection: Heart
It is not the nature of the task, but its consecration, that is the vital thing.Collection: Tasks
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.Collection: Dream
All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.Collection: Names
One need ask only 'What for? What am I to unify my being for?' The reply is: Not for my own sake.Collection: Needs
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.Collection: Angel
Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling - the equality of all lovers.Collection: Responsibility
The basic word I-Thou can be spoken only with one's whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a Thou to become; becoming I, I say Thou.Collection: Fusion