Quotes by Martin Buber

“The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.”

“All actual life is encounter.”

“We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.”

“Though the 'Thou' is not an 'It', it is also not "another 'I'". He who treats a person as "another 'I'" does not really see that person but only a projected image of himself. Such a relation, despi...”

“Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.”

“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.”

“Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists - that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education. Because this human being exists, meaninglessness, however hard pressed...”

“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”

“All real living is meeting.”

“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.”

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

“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.”

“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.”

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

“But a person, I would say, is an individual living really with the world. And 'with' the world, I don't mean in the world- just in real contact, in real reciprocity with the world in all the points...”

“But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue w...”

“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.”

“All real living is meeting.”

“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.”

“But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue w...”