Martin Buber Quotes on God
Martin Buber was a 20th-century Austrian-born Israeli Jewish philosopher and one of the most influential figures of modern Jewish religious thought. This page collects quotes attributed to Martin Buber on the topic of god, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Martin Buber:
“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”
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Attributed to Martin Buber:
“The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.”
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“It is the highest service to submit the evil impulse to God through the power of love.”
For The Sake of Heaven(1945) | p. 45 -
“God ... demands everything, in order to give everything anew to him who loves Him, after that loving has truly given up all.”
For The Sake of Heaven(1945) | p. 45 -
“In the presence of God himself man stands always like a solitary tree in the wilderness.”
For The Sake of Heaven(1945) | p. 95 -
“When we desire to lead men to God, we must not simply overthrow their idols. In each of these images we must seek to discover what divine quality he who carved it sought.”
For The Sake of Heaven(1945) | p. 117 -
“Whoever abhors the name and fancies that he is godless — when he addresses with his whole devoted being the Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other, he addresses God.”
I and Thou(1923) -
“God ... desires His creature to be able to oppose Him. He has given that creature freedom. ... When man turns away from evil with that whole measure of power with which he is able to rebel against God, then he has truly turned to God.”
For The Sake of Heaven(1945) | p. 44 -
“All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.”
I and Thou(1923) -
“Avoid melancholy with all your might. It hurts the service of God more than sin. Satan takes less pleasure in sin than in a man's melancholy over having sinned again and so feeling that he is a slave to sin. Thus the Evil One has caught the poor soul in the net of despair.”
For The Sake of Heaven(1945) | Rabbi Jaacob Yitzchak, p. 7 -
“The realer religion is, so much the more it means its own overcoming. It wills to cease to be the special domain "Religion" and wills to become life. It is concerned in the end not with specific religious acts, but with redemption from all that is specific.”
Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy(1952) | p. 34