All actual life is encounter. — 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–for that is the meaning of your life. — Martin Buber

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. — Martin Buber

True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is lived in the past. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

God made so many different kinds of people; why would God allow only one way to worship? — 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

When a man has made peace within himself, he will be able to make peace in the whole world. — Martin Buber

Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. — Martin Buber

One who truly meets the world goes out also to God. — Martin Buber

Every person born in this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique. — Martin Buber

Mundus vult decipi. The world winks at dishonesty. The world does not call it dishonesty. — Martin Buber

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

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

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

Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself. — Martin Buber

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

Power abdicates only under the stress of counter–power. — Martin Buber

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

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

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

Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation. — 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

Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons. — Martin Buber

What, then, does one experience of the You?––Nothing at all. For one does not experience it.––What, then, does one know of the You?––Only everything. For one no longer knows particulars. — Martin Buber

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

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

Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity. — Martin Buber