Martin Buber Quotes on Life
Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue gave him a distinctive understanding of life itself, and the quotes gathered here express it. Its keynote is a single sentence: all real living is meeting, since genuine life, for Buber, is realised not in isolation but in the encounter between an I and a Thou. He held that life carries a moral demand within it, that life, in that it is life, necessarily entails justice, and he reflected on how solitude, in the ice of its extremity, turns a person into a question to himself. Buber also believed that the truest religion seeks to overcome itself and become life, concerned in the end with the whole of existence rather than with specifically religious acts. Drawn from I and Thou and his later works, these passages present life as fundamentally relational.
Quotes
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“All real living is meeting.”
Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung. -
“Life , in that it is life, necessarily entails justice .”
Politics and Morality" in Be'ayot (April 1945), as published in A Land of Two Peoples : Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (1983) edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, p. 169 -
“To win a truly great life for the people of Israel , a great peace is necessary, not a fictitious peace, the dwarfish peace that is no more than a feeble intermission, but a true peace with the neighboring peoples, which alone can render possible a common development of this portion of the earth as the vanguard of the awakening Near East.”
Our Reply" (September 1945), as published in A Land of Two Peoples : Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs (1983) edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr, p. 178 | Variant translation: Only a true peace with neighboring peoples can render possible a common development of this portion of the earth as a vanguard of the awakening of the Near East. -
“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.”
What is Man? (1938) | p. 150 -
“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) -
“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