Martin Buber
The future stands in need of you in order to be born.Collection: Order
Without being and remaining oneself, there is no love.Collection: Oneself
Meet the world with the fullness of your being, and you shall meet God. Of you wish to believe, love.Collection: Believe
There is something that can be found in one place. It is a great treasure which may be called the fulfillment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place where one standsCollection: Treasure
Let us, cautious in diction, And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully.Collection: Life
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?Collection: World
What has to be given up is not the I, but that drive for self-affirmation which impels man to flee from the unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous world of relation into the having of things.Collection: Men
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 HeavenCollection: Heaven
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 the holy Baal Shem 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 himself 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.Collection: Teacher
Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.Collection: Entering
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.Collection: Ego
How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you - for that is the meaning of your life.Collection: Life
Only men who are capable of saying Thou [an attitude of deep respect] to one another can truly say we with one another.Collection: Attitude
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).Collection: Gnosticism
We may listen to our inner self-and still not know which ocean we hear roaring.Collection: Ocean
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.Collection: Learning
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"Collection: Country
Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.Collection: Ethics
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.Collection: Journey
And if there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision.Collection: Decision
What you must do is love your neighbor as yourself. There is no one who knows your many faults better than you! But you love yourself notwithstanding. And so you must love your neighbor, no matter how many faults you see in him.Collection: Love 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.78Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Love Is
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.Collection: Mother
No limits are set to the ascent of man, and to each and everyone the highest stands open. Here it is only your personal choice that decides.Collection: Men
When a man grows aware of a new way in which to serve God, he should carry it around with him secretly, and without uttering it, for nine months, as though he were pregnant with it, and let others know of it only at the end of that time, as though it were a birth.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Quality
The perfection of any matter, the highest or the lowest, touches on the divine.Collection: Perfection
To produce is to draw forth, to invent is to find, to shape is to discover.Collection: Discovery
One who truly meets the world goes out also to God.Collection: World
Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God - such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is now passingCollection: Character
One must be truly able to say I in order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth.Collection: Order
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.Collection: Boys
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.Collection: Men
What is it that is eternal: the primal phenomenon, present in the here and now, of what we call revelation? It is man's emerging from the moment of the supreme encounter, being no longer the same as he was when entering into it.Collection: Men
Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power. ... The great man, whether we comprehend him in the most intense activity of his work or in the restful equipoise of his forces , is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind , the incarnation of the spirit .Collection: Powerful
It is usual to think of good and evil as two poles, two opposite directions, the antithesis of one another...We must begin by doing away with this convention.Collection: Thinking
Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself.Collection: Creation
This is the risk: the primary word can only be spoken with the whole being. He who gives himself to it may withhold nothing of himself.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Thinking
In philosophical anthropology, ... where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature.Collection: Philosophical
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.Collection: Philosophical
But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partially of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found?Collection: Men
This is the sacrifice: the endless possibility that is offered up on the altar of the form.Collection: Sacrifice
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.Collection: Night
As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and whirl of doom congeals.Collection: Long