110+ Martin Buber Quotes On Relationships, Dialogue And Existentialism

Martin Buber was a German philosopher, religious thinker, and political activist. He is best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of religious existentialism centered on the distinction between the I-Thou relationship and the I-It relationship. His work has had a profound impact on religious, social, and political thought in the twentieth century. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Martin Buber on relationships, dialogue, existentialism.

Top 10 Martin Buber Quotes

1. When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.
2. The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.
3. All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
4. Solitude is the place of purification.
5. Every person born in this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique.
6. 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.
7. An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.
8. Human life and humanity come into being in genuine encounters. The hope for this hour depends upon the renewal of the immediacy of dialogue among human beings.
9. God made so many different kinds of people; why would God allow only one way to worship?
10. When a man has made peace within himself, he will be able to make peace in the whole world.

Martin Buber Image Quotes

Solitude is the place of purification. — Martin Buber

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

Martin Buber Short Quotes

• I don't like religion much, and I am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found.
• There is no room for God in him who is full of himself.
• Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived.
• We may listen to our inner self-and still not know which ocean we hear roaring.
• Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.
• Power abdicates only under the stress of counter-power.
• The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.
• It pains me to speak of God in the third person.
• Leisure is the exultation of the possible.
• This is the sacrifice: the endless possibility that is offered up on the altar of the form.

Martin Buber Quotes About Relationships

What has to be given up is not the I, as most mystics suppose: this I is indispensable for any relationship, including the highest, which always presupposes an I and You. — Martin Buber

Our relationships live in the space between us which is sacred. — Martin Buber

If we had the power over the ends of the earth, it would not give us that fulfillment of existence which a quiet devoted relationship to nearby life can give us. — Martin Buber

In the beginning was the relationship. — Martin Buber

Martin Buber Quotes About Humanism

This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul's creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being. — Martin Buber

The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny. There is a divine meaning of the world, of man, of human persons, of you and me. — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

A human being becomes whole not in virtue of a relation to himself [only] but rather in virtue of an authentic relation to another human being(s). — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

I think no human being can give more than this. Making life possible for the other, if only for a moment. — Martin Buber

God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being and with the quality peculiar to human beings. — Martin Buber

Martin Buber Quotes About Life

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. — Martin Buber

Let us, cautious in diction, And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully. — Martin Buber

All actual life is encounter. — Martin Buber

The ones who count are those persons who - though they may be of little renown - respond to and are responsible for the continuation of the living spirit. — Martin Buber

All real living is meeting. — Martin Buber

Real faith means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life and which cannot be comprised in any formula. Real faith means the ability to endure life in the face of this mystery. — Martin Buber

In the ice of solitude man becomes most inexorably a question to himself, and just because the question pitilessly summons and draws into play his most secret life he becomes an experience to himself. — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

Martin Buber Quotes About Nature

For sin is just this, what man cannot by its very nature do with his whole being; it is possible to silence the conflict in the soul, but it is not possible to uproot it. — Martin Buber

It is not the nature of the task, but its consecration, that is the vital thing. — Martin Buber

One cannot in the nature of things expect a little tree that has been turned into a club to put forth leaves. — Martin Buber

Martin Buber Quotes About Love

What you must do is love your neighbor as yourself. There is no one who knows your many faults better than you! But you love yourself notwithstanding. And so you must love your neighbor, no matter how many faults you see in him. — Martin Buber

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

We cannot avoid using power, cannot escape the compulsion to aflict the world so let us, cautious in diction and mighty in contradiction, love powerfully. — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

Without being and remaining oneself, there is no love. — Martin Buber

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

Feeling one "has"; love occurs. — Martin Buber

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

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. — Martin Buber

He who loves brings God and the World together. — Martin Buber

Martin Buber Famous Quotes And Sayings

When people come to you for help, do not turn them off with pious words, saying, 'Have faith and take your troubles to God.' Act instead as though there were no God, as though there were only one person in the world who could help -- only yourself. — Martin Buber

In spite of all similarities, every living situation has, like a newborn child, a new face, that has never been before and will never come again. It demands of you a reaction that cannot be prepared beforehand. It demands nothing of what is past. It demands presence, responsibility; it demands you. — Martin Buber

Solitude is the place of purification. — Martin Buber

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

Every morning, I shall concern myself anew about the boundary, Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No, And pressing forward honor reality. We cannot avoid, Using power, Cannot escape the compulsion, To afflict the world, So let us, cautious in diction, And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully. — Martin Buber

Every person born into the world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique....If there had been someone like her in the world, there would have been no need for her to be born." --Martin Buber as quoted in Narrative Means for Sober Ends, by Jon Diamond, p.78 — Martin Buber

Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God - such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is now passing — Martin Buber

Every man's foremost task is the actualization of his unique, unprecedented and never-recurring potentialities, and not the repetition of something that another, and be it even the greatest, has already achieved. — Martin Buber

If you want to raise a man from mud and filth, do not think it is enough to stay on top and reach a helping hand down to him. You must go all the way down yourself, down into mud and filth. Then take hold of him with strong hands and pull him and yourself out into the light. — Martin Buber

What has to be given up is not the I, but that drive for self-affirmation which impels man to flee from the unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous world of relation into the having of things. — Martin Buber

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? — Martin Buber

I have to tell it again and again: I have no doctrine. I only point out something. I point out reality, I point out something in reality which has not or too little been seen. I take him who listens to me at his hand and lead him to the window. I push open the window and point outside. I have no doctrine, I carry on a dialogue. — Martin Buber

Everything is full of sacramental substance, everything. Each thing and each function is ever ready to light up into a sacrament. — Martin Buber

I shall teach you the best way to say Torah. You must cease to be aware of yourselves. You must be nothing but an ear that hears what the universe of the word is constantly saying within you. The moment you start hearing what you yourself are saying, YOU must stop. — Martin Buber

The perpetual enemy of faith in the true God is not atheism (the claim that there is no God), but rather Gnosticism (the claim that God is known). — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

Play is the exultation of the possible. — Martin Buber

I'm not sure I can take your advice. You are dealing with English Gentlemen. We are dealing with monsters. — Martin Buber

To produce is to draw forth, to invent is to find, to shape is to discover. — Martin Buber

The salvation of man does not lie in his holding himself far removed from the worldly, but in consecrating it to holy, to divine meaning. — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

The work produced is a thing among things, able to be experienced and described as a sum of qualities. But from time to time it can face the receptive beholder in its whole embodied form. — Martin Buber

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

It is usual to think of good and evil as two poles, two opposite directions, the antithesis of one another...We must begin by doing away with this convention. — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

What is it that is eternal: the primal phenomenon, present in the here and now, of what we call revelation? It is man's emerging from the moment of the supreme encounter, being no longer the same as he was when entering into it. — Martin Buber

When a man grows aware of a new way in which to serve God, he should carry it around with him secretly, and without uttering it, for nine months, as though he were pregnant with it, and let others know of it only at the end of that time, as though it were a birth. — Martin Buber

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 — Martin Buber

The ones who count are those persons who — Martin Buber

You can rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way-- it will always be muck. Have I sinned or have I not sinned? In the time I am brooding over it, I could be stringing pearls for the delight of Heaven — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes. — Martin Buber

In the story of the Creation we read: ". . . And behold, it was very good." But, in the passage where Moses reproves Israel, the verse says: "See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil." Where did the evil come from? Evil too is good. It is the lowest rung of perfect goodness. If you do good deeds, even evil will become good; but if you sin, evil will really become evil. — Martin Buber

Everyone has in him something precious that is in no one else. — Martin Buber

Jedes geeinzelte Du ist ein Durchblick zu ihm. Durch jedes geeinzelte Du spricht das Grundwort das Ewige an. Every particularThou is a glimpse through to the eternal Thou; by means of every particularThou the primary word addresses the eternal Thou. 164 — Martin Buber

The world is a spinning die, and everything turns and changes: man is turned into angel, and angel into man, and the head into the foot, and the foot into the head. Thus all things turn and spin and change, this into that, and that into this, the topmost to the undermost, and the undermost to the topmost. For at the root all is one, and salvation inheres in the change and return of things. — Martin Buber

To begin with oneself but not to end with onself. To start from oneself but not to aim at oneself. — Martin Buber

The future stands in need of you in order to be born. — Martin Buber

The historical religions have the tendency to become ends in themselves, and, as it were, to put themselves in God's place, and, in fact, there is nothing that is so apt to obscure God's face as a religion. — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

The I of the basic word I-Thou is different from that of the basic word I-It. — Martin Buber

Through the Thou a person becomes I. — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

Everything depends on inner change; when this has taken place, then, and only then does the world change. — Martin Buber

And if there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision. — Martin Buber

To him who knows how to read the legend, it conveys more truth than the chronicle. — Martin Buber

Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.Persons appear byentering into relationwith other persons. — Martin Buber

One need ask only 'What for? What am I to unify my being for?' The reply is: Not for my own sake. — Martin Buber

The prophet is appointed to oppose the kind, and even more: history. — Martin Buber

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power. ... The great man, whether we comprehend him in the most intense activity of his work or in the restful equipoise of his forces , is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind , the incarnation of the spirit . — Martin Buber

You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness; in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight. — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

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

About what mainly constituted what you ask, it was something other. It was just a certain inclination to meet people. And as far as possible, to change something in the other, but also to let me be changed by him. At any event, I had no resistance, I put no resistance to it. I already began as a young man. I felt I have not the right to want to change another if I am not open to be changed by him as far as it is legitimate. — Martin Buber

God is the "mysterium tremendum," that appears and overthrows, but he is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I. — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

This is the risk: the primary word can only be spoken with the whole being. He who gives himself to it may withhold nothing of himself. — Martin Buber

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

There is something that can be found in one place. It is a great treasure which may be called the fulfillment of existence. The place where this treasure can be found is the place where one stands — Martin Buber

We can learn to be whole by saying what we mean and doing what we say. — Martin Buber

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? — Martin Buber

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

To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence. — Martin Buber

Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way. — Martin Buber

Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor, but the actual truth. Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its " content," its object; but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses. — Martin Buber

Creation happens to us, burns into us, changes us, we tremble and swoon, we submit. Creation - we participate in it, we encounter the creator, offer ourselves to him, helpers and companions. — Martin Buber

We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves. — Martin Buber

Religion means goal and way, politics implies end and means. The political end is recognizable by the fact that it may be attained--in success--and its attainment is historically recorded. The religious goal remains, even in man's highest experiences, that which simply provides direction on the mortal way; it never enters into historical consummation. — Martin Buber

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

Life Lessons by Martin Buber

1. Martin Buber taught that the most important thing in life is to have meaningful relationships and to treat others with respect and kindness.
2. He argued that the only way to truly understand the world is to enter into genuine dialogue with others.
3. He believed that by recognizing the humanity in others, we can learn to appreciate the differences between us and develop a deeper understanding of the world.