Martin Buber Quotes on Love
Martin Buber’s I and Thou (Ich und Du, 1923) gave twentieth-century philosophy of religion its most influential dialogical account of love. The fundamental contrast is between the two basic word-pairs through which the human being addresses the world — I-It and I-Thou — with love understood not as a feeling that an I has for a Thou but as the relation in which both partners stand toward one another in their full reality, never as objects to be inventoried. The framework grounds Buber’s parallel reading of biblical religion (Two Types of Faith), his retrieval of Hasidic narrative, and the broader twentieth-century philosophy-of-dialogue tradition through Levinas, Marcel, and Rosenzweig.
Quotes
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“All real living is meeting.”
Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung. -
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 world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.”
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“Through the Thou a person becomes I.”
I and Thou, 1923 -
“Every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary Between the love - deed -Yes and the power -deed-No And pressing forward honor reality . 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.”
Power and Love" (1926) -
“Power and Love" (1926)”
Every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary Between the love - deed -Yes and the power -deed-No And pressing forward honor reality . 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. -
“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