Quotes from Martin Buber

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

When I was young, I admired people who were clever. Now that I am old, I admire people who are kind.

Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return.

I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me

What, then, does one experience of the You? -- Nothing at all. For one does not experience it. -- What, then, does one know of the You? -- Only everything. For one no longer knows particulars.

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 you are by it, cannot be the real truth. Because this human being exists, in the darkness the light lies hidden, in fear salvation, and in the callousness of one's fellow-men the great Love.

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.

What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Men prefer to forget how many possibilities are open to them.

Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation.

I do not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolutes, but on a narrow, rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but [only] the certainty of meeting what remains, undisclosed.

Mundus vult decipi. The world winks at dishonesty. The world does not call it dishonesty.

Marriage, for instance, will never be given new life except by that out of which true marriage always arises, the revealing by two people of the Thou to one another. Out of this a marriage is built up by the Thou that is neither of the I's. This is the metaphysical and metapsychical factor of love to which feelings of love are mere accompaniments.

If a man wishes to guide the people in his house the right way, he must not grow angry at them. For anger does not only make one's soul impure; it transfers impurity to the souls of those with whom one is angry.

The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one's whole being. The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one's whole being.

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.

Creation does not merely take place once in the beginning but also at every moment throughout the whole of time.

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.

For Judaism, God is not a Kantian idea but an elementally present spiritual reality—neither something conceived by pure reason nor something postulated by practical reason, but emanating from the immediacy of existence as such, which religious man steadfastly confronts and nonreligious man evades.

True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is lived in the past.

The third (sphere in which the world of relation arises): Life with spiritual beings. Here the relations is wrapped in a cloud but reveals itself, it lacks but creates language. We hear no You and yet addressed; we answer - creating, thinking, acting: with our being we speak the basic word, unable to say You with our mouth. Bt how can we incorporate into the world of the basic word that lies outside language?

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 with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partially of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found?

There is a light over every person, and when two souls meet, their lights come together, and a single light emerges from them to feel the universal generation as a sea, and oneself as a wave in it.

When you spread forth your hands, I hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I no longer listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. Is that too little?

the fact that every people feel itself threatened by the others gives the state it's definite unifying powers; it depends upon the instinct of self-preservation of society itself; the latent external crisis enables it to get the upper hand in internal crises