222 Quotes by Martin Buber

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.

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

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.

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

You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.

Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other…. Secretly and bashfully he watches for a YES which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.

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.

God made so many different kinds of people; why would God allow only one way to worship?

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