Quotes About Connection

It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, as it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay.

You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?

No one is too far away to be cared for, or to care.

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.

The perfection of any matter, the highest or the lowest, touches on the divine.

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

Creation happens to us, burns itself into us, recasts us in burning -- we tremble and are faint, we submit. We take part in creation, meet the Creator, reach out to Him, helpers and companions.

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 human person, the human being, is not just an object among objects, not just a thing in the world. The human being is a being-in-the-world, a being-with-others, a being-for-others.

All real life is meeting.

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 is the meaning of your life.

God can be addressed, but not expressed.

No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.

Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.

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.

Feeling one "has"; love occurs.

As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and whirl of doom congeals.

Spirit is not in the I but between I and You.

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

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.

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

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.