Top 140 Martin Buber Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.”

— Martin Buber

102. “If a man wishes to guide the people in his house the right way, he must not grow angry at them. For anger does not only make one’s soul impure; it transfers impurity to the souls of those with whom one is angry.”

— Martin Buber

103. “Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.”

— Martin Buber

104. “Creation happens to us, burns into us, changes us, we tremble and swoon, we submit. Creation – we participate in it, we encounter the creator, offer ourselves to him, helpers and companions.”

— Martin Buber

105. “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

106. “God cannot be seen, but He can listened to and spoken to!”

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

108. “One need ask only ‘What for? What am I to unify my being for?’ The reply is: Not for my own sake.”

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

110. “Creation does not merely take place once in the beginning but also at every moment throughout the whole of time.”

— Martin Buber

111. “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

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

— Martin Buber

113. “There is a light over every person, and when two souls meet, their lights come together, and a single light emerges from them to feel the universal generation as a sea, and oneself as a wave in it.”

— Martin Buber

114. “The only possible relationship with God is to address him and to be addressed by him, here and now – or, as Buber puts it, in the present.”

— Martin Buber

115. “Jedes geeinzelte Du ist ein Durchblick zu ihm. Durch jedes geeinzelte Du spricht das Grundwort das Ewige an. Every particularThou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou; by means of every particularThou the primary word addresses the eternal Thou. 164.”

— Martin Buber

116. “Marriage, for instance, will never be given new life except by that out of which true marriage always arises, the revealing by two people of the Thou to one another. Out of this a marriage is built up by the Thou that is neither of the I’s. This is the metaphysical and metapsychical factor of love to which feelings of love are mere accompaniments.”

— Martin Buber

117. “And if there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision.”

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

119. “Of Enoch, who walked with Elohim, it is told that he had become one of the angels who was all eyes and wings. Thus is the poet. Everything in him perceives the things, and everything in him flies past the things. He is wholly in the one thing that he experiences, and yet is already and still in all the others at the same time.”

— Martin Buber

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

— Martin Buber

121. “What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Men prefer to forget how many possibilities are open to them.”

— Martin Buber

122. “True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is lived in the past.”

— Martin Buber

123. “As long as love is “blind” – that is, as long as it does not see a whole being – it does not yet truly stand under the basic word of relation. Hatred remains blind by its very nature; one can hate only part of a being.”

— Martin Buber

124. “Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation.”

— Martin Buber

125. “Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or great teachers. They save men from confusion and hard choices. They offer a single choice that is easy to make because those who do not take the path that is commended to them live a wretched life. To walk far on this path may be difficult, but the choice is easy, and to hear the celebration of this path is pleasant. Wisdom offers simple schemes, but truth is not so simple.”

— Martin Buber

126. “And how shall we be able to tell whether he is a true zaddik?” The Baal Shem replied. “Ask him to advise you what to do to keep unholy thoughts from disturbing you in your prayers and studies. If he gives you advice, then you will know that he belongs to those who are of no account. For this is the service of men in the world to the very hour of their death; to struggle time after time with the extraneous, and time after time to uplift and fit it into the nature of the Divine Name.”

— Martin Buber

127. “One cannot divide one’s life between an actual relationship to God and an inactual I-It relationship to the world – praying to God in truth and utilizing the world. Whoever knows the world as something to be utilized knows God the same way. His prayers are a way of unburdening himself – and fall into the ears of the void.”

— Martin Buber

128. “It was from Buber’s other writings that I learned what could also be found in I and Thou: the central commandment to make the secular sacred.”

— Martin Buber

129. “The differences between Buber and Hegel far outnumber their similarities. But they are at one in their opposition to any otherworldliness, in their insistence on finding in the present whatever beauty and redemption there may be, and in their refusal to pin their hopes on any beyond.”

— Martin Buber

130. “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.”

— Martin Buber

131. “When I was young, I admired people who were clever. Now that I am old, I admire people who are kind.”

— Martin Buber

132. “If you cannot get across it, you must get across it, nevertheless.”

— Martin Buber

133. “The most beautiful life that has been imagined is the life of the knight Don Quixote who created danger where he did not find it. But more beautiful still is the lived life of him who finds danger in all places. All creation stands on the edge of being; all creation is risk. He who does not risk his soul can only ape the creator.”

— Martin Buber

134. “Solitude is the place of purification.”

— Martin Buber

135. “In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally don’t know how to read them.”

— Martin Buber

136. “Rabbi Heshel said: “A man should be like a vessel that willingly receives what its owner pours into it, whether it be wine or vinegar.”

— Martin Buber

137. “For Judaism, God is not a Kantian idea but an elementally present spiritual reality – neither something conceived by pure reason nor something postulated by practical reason, but emanating from the immediacy of existence as such, which religious man steadfastly confronts and nonreligious man evades.”

— Martin Buber

138. “Thus the poet is the messenger of God and of the earth and is at home in the two spheres. The force of fire is his force; it burns in contradiction, and it shines in unity. Like Enoch, of whom a legend tells that he was transformed from flesh to fire; his bones are glowing coals, but his eyelashes are the splendor of the firmament.”

— Martin Buber

139. “On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish.”

— Martin Buber

140. “By the term short story I mean the recital of a destiny which is represented in a single incident; by anecdote the recital of a single incident which illumines an entire destiny.”

— Martin Buber

141. “The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one’s whole being.”

— Martin Buber