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.
One cannot divide one’s life between an actual relationship to God and an inactual I-It relationship to the world – praying to God in truth and utilizing the world. Whoever knows the world as something to be utilized knows God the same way. His prayers are a way of unburdening himself – and fall into the ears of the void.
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.
On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish.
Feelings are ‘entertained’; love comes to pass. Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love.
And how shall we be able to tell whether he is a true zaddik?” The Baal Shem replied. “Ask him to advise you what to do to keep unholy thoughts from disturbing you in your prayers and studies. If he gives you advice, then you will know that he belongs to those who are of no account. For this is the service of men in the world to the very hour of their death; to struggle time after time with the extraneous, and time after time to uplift and fit it into the nature of the Divine Name.
If you cannot get across it, you must get across it, nevertheless.
The differences between Buber and Hegel far outnumber their similarities. But they are at one in their opposition to any otherworldliness, in their insistence on finding in the present whatever beauty and redemption there may be, and in their refusal to pin their hopes on any beyond.
For Judaism, God is not a Kantian idea but an elementally present spiritual reality – neither something conceived by pure reason nor something postulated by practical reason, but emanating from the immediacy of existence as such, which religious man steadfastly confronts and nonreligious man evades.
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.
In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally don’t know how to read them.
Rabbi Heshel said: “A man should be like a vessel that willingly receives what its owner pours into it, whether it be wine or vinegar.
Of Enoch, who walked with Elohim, it is told that he had become one of the angels who was all eyes and wings. Thus is the poet. Everything in him perceives the things, and everything in him flies past the things. He is wholly in the one thing that he experiences, and yet is already and still in all the others at the same time.
By the term short story I mean the recital of a destiny which is represented in a single incident; by anecdote the recital of a single incident which illumines an entire destiny.
Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or great teachers. They save men from confusion and hard choices. They offer a single choice that is easy to make because those who do not take the path that is commended to them live a wretched life. To walk far on this path may be difficult, but the choice is easy, and to hear the celebration of this path is pleasant. Wisdom offers simple schemes, but truth is not so simple.
Thus the poet is the messenger of God and of the earth and is at home in the two spheres. The force of fire is his force; it burns in contradiction, and it shines in unity. Like Enoch, of whom a legend tells that he was transformed from flesh to fire; his bones are glowing coals, but his eyelashes are the splendor of the firmament.
The most beautiful life that has been imagined is the life of the knight Don Quixote who created danger where he did not find it. But more beautiful still is the lived life of him who finds danger in all places. All creation stands on the edge of being; all creation is risk. He who does not risk his soul can only ape the creator.
Creation does not merely take place once in the beginning but also at every moment throughout the whole of time.
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.
The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one’s whole being.