Martin Buber
49 quotes
Biography
Martin Buber was an Austrian-Israeli philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of existentialism centered on the distinction between the I–Thou relationship and the I–It relationship.
"The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings."
"The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God."
"We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves."
"Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way."
"All actual life is encounter."
"Life, in that it is life, necessarily entails justice."
"Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?'""
"To win a truly great life for the people of Israel, a great peace is necessary, not a fictitious peace, the dwarfish peace that is no more than a feeble intermission, but a true peace with the neighboring peoples, which alone can render possible a common development of this portion of the earth as the vanguard of the awakening Near East."
"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."
"The prophet is appointed to oppose the king, and even more: history."
"I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man's life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience."
"The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda."
"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."
"The Thou encounters me by grace — it cannot be found by seeking. But that I speak the basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, is my essential deed."
"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."
"Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung."
"The I of the basic word I-Thou is different from that of the basic word I-It."
"An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language."
"Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos."
"Person erscheint, indem sie zu andern Personen in Beziehung tritt."
"All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him."
"Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable. And how much weight has all erroneous talk about God's nature and works (although there never has been nor can be any such talk that is not erroneous) compared with the one truth that all men who have addressed God really meant him? For whoever pronounces the word God and really means Thou, addresses, no matter what his delusion, the true Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom he stands in a relationship that includes all others."
"Whoever abhors the name and fancies that he is godless — when he addresses with his whole devoted being the Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other, he addresses God."
"Through the Thou a person becomes I."
"In philosophical anthropology, … where the subject is man in his wholeness, the investigator cannot content himself, as in anthropology as an individual science, with considering man as another part of nature and with ignoring the fact that he, the investigator, is himself a man and experiences this humanity in his inner experience in a way that he simply cannot experience any part of nature."