Quotes from Martin Buber

If a person kills a tree before its time, it is like having murdered a soul.-Rabbi Nachman

The true meaning of love one's neighbor is not that it is a command from God which we are to fulfill, but that through it and in it we meet God.

He who loves brings God and the World together.

Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling - the equality of all lovers.

Feeling one "has"; love occurs.

We should also pray for the wicked among the peoples of the world; we should love them too.

Meet the world with the fullness of your being, and you shall meet God. Of you wish to believe, love.

Without being and remaining oneself, there is no love.

There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less common than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion. But rarest of all is a passionable spirit.

One must be truly able to say I in order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth.

Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived.

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

To love God truly, one must first love man. And if anyone tells you that he loves God and does not love his fellow-man, you will know that he is lying.

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

No limits are set to the ascent of man, and to each and everyone the highest stands open. Here it is only your personal choice that decides.

Read the Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar, as though it had not been set before you ready-made. Face the book with a new attitude as something new.

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?

Freedom and destiny are solemnly promised to one another and linked together in meaning.

The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.

We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.

Solitude is the place of purification.

From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother.

All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.

There are three principles in a man's being and life, the principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I mean and I don't do what I say.