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.
As I actualize, I uncover.
All actual life is encounter.
This is the sacrifice: the endless possibility that is offered up on the altar of the form...
Everything is full of sacramental substance, everything. Each thing and each function is ever ready to light up into a sacrament.
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.
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.
For God does not want to be believed in, to be debated and defended by us, but simply to be realized through us.
When I was young, I admired people who were clever. Now that I am old, I admire people who are kind.
What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Men prefer to forget how many possibilities are open to them.
As long as love is “blind” – that is, as long as it does not see a whole being – it does not yet truly stand under the basic word of relation. Hatred remains blind by its very nature; one can hate only part of a being.
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.
It was from Buber’s other writings that I learned what could also be found in I and Thou: the central commandment to make the secular sacred.
If a man wishes to guide the people in his house the right way, he must not grow angry at them. For anger does not only make one’s soul impure; it transfers impurity to the souls of those with whom one is angry.
Spirit is not in the I but between I and You.
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.
Mundus vult decipi. The world winks at dishonesty. The world does not call it dishonesty.
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.
True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is lived in the past.
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.