222 Quotes by Martin Buber

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

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.

The basic word I-Thou can be spoken only with one’s whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a Thou to become; becoming I, I say Thou.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.