Martin Buber quotes

Martin Buber was an Austrian-Jewish philosopher, best known for his philosophy of dialogue and the concept of "I-Thou" relationships. His work deeply influenced theology, philosophy, education, and Jewish thought. He contributed significantly to the understanding of human relationships and spiritual life. Here are 88 of his quotes:

Solitude is the place of purification.

Martin Buber

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

Martin Buber

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

Martin Buber

Play is the exultation of the possible.

Martin Buber

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.

Martin Buber

Through the Thou a person becomes I.

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

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.

Martin Buber

The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.

Martin Buber

All actual life is encounter.

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

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

Martin Buber

Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.

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

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

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

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

The concept of guilt is found most powerfully developed even in the most primitive communal forms which we know: ... the man is guilty who violates one of the original laws which dominate the society and which are mostly derived from a divine founder; the boy who is accepted into the tribal community and learns its laws, which bind him thenceforth, learns to promise; this promise is often given under the sign of death, which is symbolically carried out on the boy, with a symbolical rebirth.

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

In the presence of God himself man stands always like a solitary tree in the wilderness.

Martin Buber

Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way.

Martin Buber

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

Martin Buber