Top 140 Martin Buber Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.”

— Martin Buber

52. “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.”

— Martin Buber

53. “The future stands in need of you in order to be born.”

— Martin Buber

54. “One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves.”

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

57. “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

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

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

60. “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

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

— Martin Buber

62. “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

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

— Martin Buber

64. “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

65. “All actual life is encounter.”

— Martin Buber

66. “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

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

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

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

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

— Martin Buber

78. “Feeling one “has”; love occurs.”

— Martin Buber

79. “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

80. “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

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. “When we encounter another individual truly as a person, not as an object for use, we become fully human.”

— Martin Buber

83. “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

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. “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

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. “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

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

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

90. “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

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

— Martin Buber

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

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

— Martin Buber

97. “Mundus vult decipi. The world winks at dishonesty. The world does not call it dishonesty.”

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

99. “Feelings are ‘entertained’; love comes to pass. Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love.”

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber