222 Quotes by Martin Buber

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.

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.

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 is the meaning of your life.

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.

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.

God is the “mysterium tremendum,” that appears and overthrows, but he is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.

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.

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

If you cannot get across it, you must get across it, nevertheless.