Martin Buber Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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

Martin Buber
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

Martin Buber
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.

Martin Buber
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

Martin Buber
An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.

Martin Buber
Nature is full of God's utterance, if one but hears it...

Martin Buber
Freedom and destiny are solemnly promised to one another and linked together in meaning.

Martin Buber
To him who knows how to read the legend, it conveys more truth than the chronicle.

Martin Buber
To love God truly, one must first love man. And if anyone tells you that he loves God and does not love his fellow-man, you will know that he is lying.

Martin Buber
This is the sacrifice: the endless possibility that is offered up on the altar of the form...

Martin Buber
Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself.

Martin Buber
Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return.

Martin Buber
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.

Martin Buber
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.

Martin Buber
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.

Martin Buber
To produce is to draw forth, to invent is to find, to shape is to discover...

Martin Buber
Everyone has in him something precious that is in no one else.

Martin Buber
God is the "mysterium tremendum," that appears and overthrows, but he is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.

Martin Buber
Meet the world with the fullness of your being, and you shall meet God. Of you wish to believe, love.

Martin Buber
When a man has made peace within himself, he will be able to make peace in the whole world.

Martin Buber
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?

Martin Buber
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.

Martin Buber
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.

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

Martin Buber
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.

Martin Buber
Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable. And how much weight has all erroneous talk about God's nature and works (although there never has been nor can be any such talk that is not erroneous) compared with the one truth that all men who have addressed God really meant him? For whoever pronounces the word God and really means Thou, addresses, no matter what his delusion, the true Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom he stands in a relationship that includes all others.

Martin Buber
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.

Martin Buber
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.

Martin Buber
Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling - the equality of all lovers..

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

Martin Buber