Quotes About Connection

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.

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.

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.

The only possible relationship with God is to address him and to be addressed by him, here and now—or, as Buber puts it, in the present.

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 in which the world can meet man.

Feelings are 'entertained'; love comes to pass. Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love.

One who truly meets the world goes out also to God.

In order to speak to the world what I have heard, I am not bound to step into the street. I may remain standing in the door of my ancestral house. …

Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.

When we encounter another individual truly as a person, not as an object for use, we become fully human

The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one's whole being.

Beziehung ist Gegenseitigkeit. Mein Du wirkt an mir, wie ich an ihm wirke. Unsre Schüler bilden uns, unsre Werke bauen uns auf. Der >>Böse<< wird offenbarend, wenn ihn das heilige Grundwort berührt. Wie werden wir von Kindern, wie von Tieren erzogen! Unerforschlich einbegriffen leben wir in der strömenden Allgegenseitigkeit.

We say 'far away'; the Zulu has for that a word which means, in our sentence form, 'There where someone cries out: "Oh mother, I am lost." ' The Fuegian soars above our analytic wisdom with a seven-syllabled word whose precise meaning is, 'They stare at one another, each waiting for the other to volunteer to do what both wish, but are not able to do.

True unity cannot be found, it can only be created. He who creates it realizes the unity of the world in the unity of his soul. Thus beforehand he must live through the tension of the world in his soul as his own soul's tension.

Feelings one "has"; love occurs. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love.

I contemplate a tree. I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground. I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the suckling of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air - and the growing itself in its darkness.

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

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

All real living is meeting.

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

Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other…. Secretly and bashfully he watches for a YES which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.