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One need ask only 'What for? What am I to unify my being for?' The reply is: Not for my own sake.

Martin Buber

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Martin Buber
Age: 87 †
Born: 1878
Born: February 8
Died: 1965
Died: June 13
Bible Translator
Educator
Existentialist
Literary Editor
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Vienna
Austria
Unify
Reply
Sake
Asks
Need
Needs

More quotes by Martin Buber

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God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being and with the quality peculiar to human beings.
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I'm not sure I can take your advice. You are dealing with English Gentlemen. We are dealing with monsters.
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The law is not thrust upon man it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes.
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The perpetual enemy of faith in the true God is not atheism (the claim that there is no God), but rather Gnosticism (the claim that God is known).
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The basic word I-Thou can be spoken only with one's whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a Thou to become becoming I, I say Thou.
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It pains me to speak of God in the third person.
Martin Buber
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When we rise out of [the night] into the new life and there begin to receive the signs, what can we know of that which - of him who gives them to us? Only what we experience from time to time from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God.
Martin Buber
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What you must do is love your neighbor as yourself. There is no one who knows your many faults better than you! But you love yourself notwithstanding. And so you must love your neighbor, no matter how many faults you see in him.
Martin Buber
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When a man grows aware of a new way in which to serve God, he should carry it around with him secretly, and without uttering it, for nine months, as though he were pregnant with it, and let others know of it only at the end of that time, as though it were a birth.
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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
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Play is the exultation of the possible.
Martin Buber
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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
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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
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Without being and remaining oneself, there is no love.
Martin Buber
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Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other…. Secretly and bashfully he watches for a YES which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.
Martin Buber
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You can rake the muck this way, rake the muck that way-- it will always be muck. Have I sinned or have I not sinned? In the time I am brooding over it, I could be stringing pearls for the delight of Heaven
Martin Buber
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Our relationships live in the space between us which is sacred.
Martin Buber
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You do not attain to knowledge by remaining on the shore and watching the foaming waves, you must make the venture and cast yourself in, you must swim, alert and with all your force, even if a moment comes when you think you are losing consciousness in this way, and in no other, do you reach anthropological insight.
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God made so many different kinds of people why would God allow only one way to worship?
Martin Buber
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One must be truly able to say I in order to know the mystery of the Thou in its whole truth.
Martin Buber