Quotes by Martin Buber

“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”

“There are three principles in a mans 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 dont do what I say.”

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

“A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for.”

“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.”

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

The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.

All actual life is encounter.

We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.

Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.

A great relationship ... breaches the barriers of a lofty solitude, subdues its strict law, and throws a bridge from self-being to self-being across the abyss of dread of the universe.

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 ones fellow-men the great Love.

When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.

All real living is meeting.

Dialogic is not to be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, the love remaining with itself - this is called Lucifer.

An animals eyes have the power to speak a great language.

But a person, I would say, is an individual living really with the world. And with the world, I dont mean in the world- just in real contact, in real reciprocity with the world in all the points in which the world can meet man.

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?

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

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.