Top 140 Martin Buber Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves.”

— Martin Buber

52. “Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.”

— Martin Buber

53. “We should also pray for the wicked among the peoples of the world; we should love them too.”

— Martin Buber

54. “You should carefully observe the way toward which your heart draws you, then choose this way with all your strength.”

— Martin Buber

55. “Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return.”

— Martin Buber

56. “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.”

— Martin Buber

57. “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

58. “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.”

— Martin Buber

59. “He who loves brings God and the World together.”

— Martin Buber

60. “We can learn to be whole by saying what we mean and doing what we say.”

— Martin Buber

61. “We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.”

— Martin Buber

62. “The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny. There is a divine meaning of the world, of man, of human persons, of you and me.”

— Martin Buber

63. “All actual life is encounter.”

— Martin Buber

64. “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.”

— Martin Buber

65. “For God does not want to be believed in, to be debated and defended by us, but simply to be realized through us.”

— Martin Buber

66. “An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.”

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

68. “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.”

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

70. “When I meet a man, I am not concerned about his opinions. I am concerned about the man.”

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

72. “Power abdicates only under stress of counter-power.”

— Martin Buber

73. “If we had the power over the ends of the earth, it would not give us that fulfillment of existence which a quiet devoted relationship to nearby life can give us.”

— Martin Buber

74. “If a person kills a tree before its time, it is like having murdered a soul.-Rabbi Nachman.”

— Martin Buber

75. “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

76. “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.”

— Martin Buber

77. “Feeling one “has”; love occurs.”

— Martin Buber

78. “Without being and remaining oneself, there is no love.”

— Martin Buber

79. “The ones who count are those persons who – though they may be of little renown – respond to and are responsible for the continuation of the living spirit.”

— Martin Buber

80. “The historical religions have the tendency to become ends in themselves, and, as it were, to put themselves in God’s place, and, in fact, there is nothing that is so apt to obscure God’s face as a religion.”

— Martin Buber

81. “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.”

— Martin Buber

82. “So long as you “have” yourself, have yourself as an object, your experience of man is only as of a thing among things.”

— Martin Buber

83. “That you need God more than anything, you know at all times in your heart. But don’t you know also that God needs you – in the fullness of his eternity, you? 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 which is the meaning of your life.”

— Martin Buber

84. “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.”

— Martin Buber

85. “The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one’s whole being. The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one’s whole being.”

— Martin Buber

86. “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.”

— Martin Buber

87. “Everything is full of sacramental substance, everything. Each thing and each function is ever ready to light up into a sacrament.”

— Martin Buber

88. “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...”

— Martin Buber

89. “We may listen to our inner self-and still not know which ocean we hear roaring.”

— Martin Buber

90. “I’m not sure I can take your advice. You are dealing with English Gentlemen. We are dealing with monsters.”

— Martin Buber

91. “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.”

— Martin Buber

92. “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

93. “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.”

— Martin Buber

94. “The tradition of the camp fire faces that of the pyramid.”

— Martin Buber

95. “Spirit is not in the I but between I and You.”

— Martin Buber

96. “I don’t like religion much, and I am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found.”

— Martin Buber

97. “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.”

— Martin Buber

98. “To him who knows how to read the legend, it conveys more truth than the chronicle.”

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

100. “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