Top 150 Quotes & Sayings by Martin Buber - Page 3

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.

The world is a spinning die, and everything turns and changes: man is turned into angel, and angel into man, and the head into the foot, and the foot into the head. Thus all things turn and spin and change, this into that, and that into this, the topmost to the undermost, and the undermost to the topmost. For at the root all is one, and salvation inheres in the change and return of things.

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.

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

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

In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

One must be truly able to say I in order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth.

Read the Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar, as though it had not been set before you ready-made. Face the book with a new attitude as something new.

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.

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.

The prophet is appointed to oppose the kind, and even more: history.

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.

The salvation of man does not lie in his holding himself far removed from the worldly, but in consecrating it to holy, to divine meaning.

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.

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.

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

The I of the basic word I-Thou is different from that of the basic word I-It.

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.

The tradition of the camp fire faces that of the pyramid.

The perfection of any matter, the highest or the lowest, touches on the divine.

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

I'm not sure I can take your advice. You are dealing with English Gentlemen. We are dealing with monsters.

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.

Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God - such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is now passing

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?

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.