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Wikipedia Summary for Martin Buber
Martin Buber (Hebrew: מרטין בובר; German: Martin Buber; Yiddish: מארטין בובער; February 8, 1878 –
June 13, 1965) was an Austrian Jewish and Israeli philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of existentialism centered on the distinction between the I–Thou relationship and the I–It relationship. Born in Vienna, Buber came from a family of observant Jews, but broke with Jewish custom to pursue secular studies in philosophy. In 1902, he became the editor of the weekly Die Welt, the central organ of the Zionist movement, although he later withdrew from organizational work in Zionism. In 1923, Buber wrote his famous essay on existence, Ich und Du (later translated into English as I and Thou), and in 1925, he began translating the Hebrew Bible into the German language reflecting the patterns of the Hebrew language.
He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature ten times, and Nobel Peace Prize seven times.
One need ask only one question: 'What for?' What am I to unify my being for? The reply is: Not for my own sake.
Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return.
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.
To be old is a glorious thing when one has not unlearned what it means to begin.
I don't like religion much, and I am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found.
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.
Let us, cautious in diction, And mighty in contradiction, Love powerfully.
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.
Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.
Without being and remaining oneself, there is no love.
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.
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?
If a person kills a tree before its time, it is like having murdered a soul.-Rabbi Nachman.
The prophet is appointed to oppose the kind, and even more: history.
The tradition of the camp fire faces that of the pyramid.
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.
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.
True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is lived in the past.
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.
All actual life is encounter.
The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.
The philosophical anthropologist ... can know the wholeness of the person and through it the wholeness of man only when he does not leave his subjectivity out and does not remain an untouched observer.
Meet the world with the fullness of your being, and you shall meet God. Of you wish to believe, love.
To him who knows how to read the legend, it conveys more truth than the chronicle.
It is not the nature of the task, but its consecration, that is the vital thing.
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.
The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.
I'm not sure I can take your advice. You are dealing with English Gentlemen. We are dealing with monsters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When a man has made peace within himself, he will be able to make peace in the whole world.
God made so many different kinds of people; why would God allow only one way to worship?
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.
Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.
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.
It pains me to speak of God in the third person.
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).
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.
One must be truly able to say I in order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth.
We may listen to our inner self-and still not know which ocean we hear roaring.
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.
Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself.
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.
Everything is full of sacramental substance, everything. Each thing and each function is ever ready to light up into a sacrament.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The beating heart of the universe is holy joy.
Every person born in this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique.
This is the sacrifice: the endless possibility that is offered up on the altar of the form.
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.
There is no room for God in him who is full of himself.
We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.
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.
When I was young, I admired people who were clever. Now that I am old, I admire people who are kind.
All real living is meeting.
When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.
Power abdicates only under the stress of counter-power.
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.
To produce is to draw forth, to invent is to find, to shape is to discover.
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.
The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes.
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.
God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being and with the quality peculiar to human beings.
To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin.
An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.
Play is the exultation of the possible.
A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for.
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.
Solitude is the place of purification.
Longer Version:
Solitude is the place of purification and transformation, the place of the great struggle and the great encounter.
The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.
Through the Thou a person becomes I.
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.