By Martin Buber
Prologue by Walter Kaufman
– Man’s wold is manifold, and his attitudes are manifold. What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple.
– Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or great teachers. They save men from confusion and hard choices.
– Wisdom offers simple schemes, but truth is not so simple. Not all simplicity is wise. But a wealth of possibilities breeds dread. Hence those who speak of many possibilities speak to a few and are of help to even fewer. The wise offer only two ways, of which one is good and thus help many.
– Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. The truth is too complex and frightening; the taste for the truth is an acquired taste that few acquire.
– The good way must be clearly good but now wholly clear. If it is quite clear, it is too easy to reject. What is wanted is an oversimplification, a reduction of a multitude of possibilities to only two. But if the recommended path were utterly devoid of mystery, it would cease to fascinate men.
– Those who dwell inside…but the lord of every sentence is no man but I…the lord of every story will be I.
– They “take” an interest , they do not give of themselves.
– Another perennial attitude is summed up in the words Us-Them. Here the world is divided in two: the children of light and the children of darkness, the sheep and the goats, the elect and the damned. Every social problem can be analyzed without much study: all one has to look for are the sheep and goats.
– Should a goat have the presumption to address a sheep, the sheep often do not hear it, and they never hear it as another I. For the goat is one of Them, not one of Us.
– Righteousness, intelligence, integrity, humanity and victory are the prerogatives of Us, while wickedness, stupidity, hypocrisy, brutality, and ultimate defeat belong to Them. Those who have managed to cut through the terrible complexities of life and offer such a scheme as this have been hailed as prophets in all ages.
– Men love jargon. It is so palpable, tangible, visible, audible; it makes so obvious what one has learned; it satisfies the craving for results. It is impressive for the uninitiated. It makes one feel that one belongs. Jargon divides men into Us and Them.
– The wise emphasize two principles.
– Innumerable are the ways in which I treat You as a means. I asks your help, I ask for information, I may buy from you or buy what you have made, and you sometimes dispel my loneliness.
– Success is no proof of virtue. In the case of a book, quick acclaim is presumptive evidence of a lack of substance and originality.
– Most books are stillborn. As the birthrate rises steeply, infant mortality soars. Most books die unnoticed; fewer live or a year or two.
– In the case of a book, longevity is presumptive evidence of virtue, although survival usually also owes a good deal to a book’s vices. A lack of clarity is almost dispensable.
– Books that survive their authors do no weather time like rocs. They are reborn without having quite died and have several overlapping lives. Some fall asleep in one country, come to life in another, and then wake up again.
– A book’s survival usually owes not a little to its vices.
– Our first love leave their mark upon us.
– Buber taught me that mysticism need not lead outside the world.
– It was from Buber’s other writings that I learned what could also be found in I and Thou: the central commandment to make the secular sacred.
– Sloth meets with awe in the refusal to unravel mysteries.
– The sacred is here and now.
– God is no object of discourse, knowledge, or even experience. He cannot be spoken of, but he can be spoken to; he cannot be seen, but he can be listened to. The only possible relationship with God is to address him and to be addressed by him, here and now—or, as Buber puts it, in the present. From him the Hebrew name of God, the tetragrammaton (YHVH) means HE IS PRESENT.
– As long as I merely experience or use you, I deny God. But when I encounter You I encounter him.
– The loves of childhood and of adolescences cannot be subtracted from us; they have become part of us. Not a discrete part that could be severed. it is as if they had entered our blood stream.
– The place of the sacred is not a house of God, no church, synagogue, or seminary, nor one day in seven, and the span of the sacred is much shorter than twenty-four hours. The sabbath is every day, several times a day.
– The Hebrews did not visualize their God and expressly forbade attempts to make him an object—a visual object, a concrete object, any object. Their God was not to be seen. He was to be heard and listened to.
– Jesus as the Son of God who had ascended to the heavens to dwell there with God, as God, did not simply become another Heracles, the son of Zeus who had ascended to the heavens to dwell there with gods, as a god.
– Man stands in a direct relationship to God and requires no mediator.
– Modern man is a voracious reader who has never learned to read well.
– Tone is crucial and often colors meaning. If we don’t know what is said seriously and what in jest, we do not know the meaning.
– What one should try to do is clear. What can be done is something else again.
The First Part
– Basic words are spoken with one’s being. When one says You, the I of the word pair I-You is said, too. When one says It, the I of the word pair I-It is said, too. The basic word I-You can only be spoken with one’s whole being. The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one’s whole being.
– The life of a human being does not exist merely in the sphere of goal-directed verbs. It does not consist merely of activities that have something for their object.
– (Buber manages to suggest that experience stays on the surface. – Kaufman)
– I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as expression of the law—those laws according to which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or those laws according to which the elements mix and separate.
– All actual life is encounter.
– Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.
– In other words: insofar as a human being makes do with the things that he experiences and uses, he lives in the past, and his moment has no presence.
– Feelings accompany the metaphysical and metapsychical fact of love, but they do not constitute it; and the feelings that accompany it can be very different. Jesus’ feeling for the possessed man is different from his feeling for the beloved disciple; but the love is one…Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is no metaphor but actuality; love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its “content” or object; it is between I and You.
– Love is a cosmic force. For those who stand in it and behold in it, men emerge from their entanglement in busy-ness; and the good and the evil, the clever and the foolish, the beautiful and the ugly, one after another become actual and a You for them.
– Believe in the simple magic of life, in service in the universe, and it will dawn on you what this waiting, peering, “stretching of the neck” of the creature means.
– Relation is reciprocity…Our students teach us, our works form us. The “wicked” become revelation when they are touched by the sacred basic word…Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity.
– Genuine contemplation never lasts long
– Consider the language of “primitive” peoples, meaning those who have remained poor in objects and whose life develops in a small sphere of acts that have a strong presence.
– that mysterious power whose concept has been found with all sorts of variations in the faith of science (both are still one at this point) of many primitive peoples
– The primitive “world” is magical not because any human power of magic might be at its center, but rather because any such human power is only a variant of the general power that is the source of all effective action.
– For the spirit is nature’s blossom
– It is in encounter that the creation reveals its formhood; it dos not pour itself into senses that are waiting but deigns to meet those that are reaching out.
– Rather, the longing for relation is primary, the cupped hand into which the being that confronts us nestles; and the relation to that, which is a wordless anticipation of saying You, comes second.
– In the relationships through which we live, the innate You is realized in the You we encounter.
– Of course, the maturing body as the carrier of its sensations and the executor of its drives stood out from its environment, but only in the next-to-each-other where one finds one’s way, not yet in the absolute separation of I and object.
– The man who has acquired an I and says I-It assumes a position before things but does not confront them in the current of reciprocity. He bends down to examine particulars under the objectifying magnifying glass of close scrutiny, or he used the objectifying telescope of distant vision to arrange them as mere scenery.
– This is part of the basic truth of the human world: only It can be put in order. Only as things cease to be our You and become our It do they become subject to coordination. The You knows no system of coordinates.
– an ordered world is not the world order.
– an ordered world, a detached world. This world is somewhat reliable; it has density and duration; its articulation can be surveyed; one can get it out again and again; one recounts it with one’s eyes closed and then checks with one’s eyes open. There it stands—right next to your skin if you think of it that way, or nestled in you soul if you prefer that: it is your object and remains that, according to your pleasure—and remains primarily alien both outside and inside you.
– You perceive it and take it for your “truth”; it permits itself to be taken by you, but it does not give itself to you.
– And in all the seriousness of truth, listen: without It a human being cannot live. But whoever lives only with that is not human.
Second Part
– The basic relation of man to the It-world includes experience, which constitutes this world ever again, and use, which leads it toward its multifarious purpose—the preservation, alleviation and equipment of human life. With the extent of the It-world the capacity for experiencing and using it must also increase. To be sure, the individual can replace direct experience more and more with indirect experience, the “acquisition of information”; and he can abbreviate use more and more until it becomes specialized “utilization”: a continual improvement of capacity from generation to generation is nevertheless indispensable. This is what is usually meant when people speak of a progressive development of the life of the spirit. This certainly involves the real linguistic sin against the spirit: for this “life of the spirit” is usually the obstacle that keeps man from living in the spirit, and at best it is only the matter that has to be mastered and formed before it an be incorporated. The obstacle: for the improvement of the capacity for experience and use generally involves a decrease in man’s power to relate—that power which alone can enable man to live in the spirit.
– Spirit is word. And even as verbal speech may first become word in the brain of man and then become sound in his throat, although both are merely refractions of the true event because in truth language does not reside in man but man stands in language and speaks out of it—so it is with all words, all spirit. Spirit is not in the I but between I and You. It is not like the blood that circulates in you but like the air in which you breathe. Man lives in the spirit when he is able to respond to his You.
– It is solely by virtue of his power to relate that man is able to live in the spirit.
– But whatever has thus been changed into It and frozen into a thing among things is still endowed with the meaning and the destiny to change back ever again. Ever again—that was the intention in that hour of the spirit when it bestowed itself upon man and begot the response in him
– The fulfillment of this meaning and this destiny is frustrated by the man who has become reconciled to the It-world as something that is to be experienced and used an who holds down what is tied into it instead of freeing it, who observes it instead of heeding it and instead of receiving it utilizes it.
– But knowledge can also be pursued by stating: “so that is how matters stand; that is the name of the thing; that is how it is constituted; that is where it belongs.” What has become an It is then taken as an It, experienced and used as an It, employed along with others things for the project of finding one’s way in the world, and eventually for the project of “conquering” the world.
– The improvement of the ability to experience and use generally involves a decrease in man’s power to relate. The man who samples the spirit as if it were spirits—what is he to do with the beings that live around him? Standing under the basic word of separation which keeps apart I and It, he has divided his life with his fellow men into two neatly defined districts: institutions and feelings. It-district and I-district.
– Institutions are what is “out there” where for all kinds of purposes one spends time, where one works, negotiates, influences, undertakes, competes, organizes, administers, officiates, preaches
– Feelings are what is “in here” where one lives and recovers from the institutions. Here the spectrum of the emotions swings before the interested eye; here one enjoys one’s inclination and one’s hatred, pleasure and, if it is not too bad, pain. Here one is at home and relaxes in one’s rocking chair.
– That feelings yield no personal life has been recognized by few so far; for they seem to be the home of what is most personal. And once one has learnt, like modern man, to become greatly preoccupied with one’s own feelings, even despair over their unreality will not easily open one’s eyes; after all, such despair is also a feeling and quite interesting.
– True community does not come into being because people have feelings for each other (though that is required, too), but rather on two accounts: all of them have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to a single living center, and they have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to one another.
– A living reciprocal relationship includes feelings but is not derived from them. A community is built upon a living, reciprocal relationship, but the builder is the living, active center.
– Marriage can never be renewed except by that which is always the source of all true marriage: that two human beings reveal the You to one another.
– And when we turn our eyes from the leaders to the led and consider the fashion of modern work and possession, don’t we find that modern developments have expunged almost every trace of a life in which human beings confront each other and have meaningful relationships?
– There is no evil drive until the drive detaches itself from our being; the drive that is wedded to and determined by our being is the plasma of communal life, while the detached drive spells its disintegration.
– If they abjure the spirit, they abjure life.
– The structures of communal human life derive their life from the fullness of the relational force that permeates their members, and they derive their embodied form from the saturation of this force by the spirit.
– In the It-world causality holds unlimited sway. Every event that is either perceivable by the senses and “physical” or discovered or found in introspection and “psychological” is considered to be of necessity cause and a cause.
– The unlimited sway of causality in the It-world, which is of fundamental importance for the scientific ordering of nature, is not felt to be oppressive by the man who is not confined to the It-world but free to step out of it again and again into the world of relation. Here I and You confront each other freely in a reciprocity that is not involved in or tainted by any causality; here man finds guaranteed the freedom of his being and of being. Only those who know relation and who know the presence of You have the capacity for decision. Whoever makes a decision is free because he has stepped before the countenance. The fiery matter of all my capacity to will surging intractably, everything possible for me revolving primevally, intertwined and seemingly inseparable, the alluring glances of potentialities flaring up from every corner, the universe as a temptation, and I, born in an instant, both hands into the fire, deep into it, where the one that intends me is hidden, my deed, seized: now!
– and decides what happens. Once one has understood this, one also knows that precisely this deserves to be called righteous: that which is set right, toward which a man directs himself and for which he deiced; and if there were a devil he would not be the one who decided against God but he that in all eternity did not decide. The man to whom freedom is guaranteed does not feel oppressed by causality.
– The man to whom freedom is guaranteed does not feel oppressed by causality.
– Fate and freedom are promised to each other. Fate is encountered only by him that actualizes freedom. That I discovered the deed that intends me, that, this movement of my freedom, reveals the mystery to me.
– It is not his limit but his completion; freedom and fate embrace each other to form meaning; and given meaning, fate—with its eyes, hitherto severe, suddenly full of light—looks like grace itself.
– Where the meaningful law of a heaven used to arch, with the spindle of necessity hanging from its bright vault, the meaningless, tyrannical power of the planets now holds sway.
– The biologistic and the historiosophical orientations of the age, which made so much of their differences, have combined to produce a faith in doom that is more obdurate and anxious than any such faith has ever been.
– It is no longer the power of karma nor the power of the stars that rules man’s lot ineluctably; many different forces claim this dominion, but upon closer examination it appears that most of our contemporaries believe in a medley of forces, as the late Romans believed in a medley of gods. The nature of these claims facilitates such a faith. Whether it is the “law of life”—a universal struggle in which everybody must either join the fight or renounce life—or the “psychological law” according to which innate drives constitute the entire human soul; or the “social law” of an inevitable social process that is merely accompanied by will and consciousness; or the “cultural law” of an unalterably uniform genesis and decline of historical forms; or whatever variations there may be: the point is always that man is yoked into an inescapable process that he cannot resist, though he may be deluded enough to try.
– But the medley idol does not tolerate any faith in liberation. It is considered foolish to imagine any freedom; one is supposed to have nothing but the choice between resolute and hopelessly rebellious slavery.
– The dogma will at most permit you to carry out conditionality with your life and to “remain free” in your soul. But he that returns considers this freedom the most ignominious slavery.
– Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return.
– The belief is doom is a delusion from the start.
– And to gain freedom from the belief in unfreedom is to gain freedom.
– One gains power over an incubus by addressing it by its real name.
– Even as freedom and fate belong together, caprice belongs with doom. But freedom and fate are promised to each other and embrace each other to constitute meaning; caprice and doom, the spook of the soul and the nightmare of the world, get along with each other, living next door and avoiding each other, without connection and friction, at home in meaninglessness—until in one instant eye meets eyes, madly, and the confession erupts from both that they are unredeemed. How much intellectual eloquence and artistry is used today to prevent or at least conceal this occurrence!
– Free is the man that wills without caprice. He believes in the actual, which is to say: he believes in the real association of the real duality, I and You. He believes in destiny and also that it needs him. It does not lead him, it waits for him. He must go forth with this whole being: that he knows. It will not turn out the way his resolve intended it; but what wants to come will come only if he resolves to do that which he can will. He must sacrifice his little will, which is unfree and ruled by things and drives, to his great will that moves away from being determined to find destiny. Now he no longer interferes, nor does he merely allow things to happen. He listens to that which grows, to the way of Being in the world, not in order to be carried along by it but rather in order to actualize it in the manner in which it, needing him, wants to be actualized by him—with human spirit and human deed, with human life and human death. He believes, I said; but this implies: he encounters.
– The capricious man does not believe and encounter. He does not know association; he only knows the feverish world out there and his feverish desire to use it.
– And what he calls destiny is merely an embellishment of and a sanction for his ability to use. In truth he has no destiny but is merely determined by things and drives, feels autocratic, and is capricious.
– For sacrifice he lacks all capacity, however much he may talk of it, and you may recognize it by nothing that he never becomes concrete. He constantly interferes, in order “to let it happen.”
– But the free man does not have an end here and then fetch the means from there; he has only one thing: always only his resolve to proceed to his destiny.
– Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons. One is the spiritual form of natural differentiation, the other that natural association. The purpose of setting oneself apart is to experience and use, and the purpose of that is “living”—which means dying one human life long. The purpose of relation is the relation itself—touching the You. For as soon as we touch a You, we are touched by a breath of eternal life.
– No human being is pure person, and none is pure ego; none is entirely actual, none entirely lacking in actuality. Each lives in a twofold world.
– The way he says I—what he means when he says I—decides where a man belongs and where he goes. The word “I” is the true shibboleth of humanity. Listen to it! How dissonant the I of the ego sounds! When it issues from tragic lips, tense with some self-contradiction that they try to hold back, it can move us to great pity. When it issues from chaotic lips that savagely, heedlessly, unconsciously represent contradiction, it can make us shudder. When the lips are vain and smooth, it sounds embarrassing or disgusting.
– But how beautiful and legitimate the vivid and emphatic I of Socrates sounds! It is the I of infinite conversation, and the air of conversation is present on all of its ways, even before his judges, even in the final hour in prison.
– How beautiful and legitimate the full I of Goethe sounds! It is the I of pure intercourse with nature. Nature yields to it and speaks ceaselessly with it; she reveals her mysteries to it and yet does not betray her mystery. IT believes in her and says to the rose: “So it is You”—and at once shares the same actuality with the rose. Hence, when it returns to itself, the spirit of actuality stays with it; the vision of the sun clings to the blessed eye that recalls its own likeness to the sun, and the friendship of the elements accompanies man into the calm of dying and rebirth.
– When we walk our way and encounter a man who comes toward us, walking his way, we know our way only and not his; for his comes to life for us only in the encounter.
– Then the one thing needful becomes visible: the total acceptance of the present. To be sure, this acceptance involves a heavier risk and a more fundamental return, the further man has lost his way in separation. What has to be given up is not the I, as most mystics suppose: the I is indispensable for any relationship, including the highest, which always presupposes and I an You. What has to be given up is not the I but that false drive for self-affirmation which impels man to flee from the unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous world of relation into the having of things.
– Every actual relationship to another being in the world is exclusive. Its You is freed and steps forth to confront us in its uniqueness. It fills the firmament—not as if there were nothing else, but everything else lives in its light.
– But as soon as a You becomes an It, the world-wideness of the relationship appears as an injustice against the world, and its exclusiveness as an exclusion of the universe.
– One does not find God if one remains in the world; one does not find God if one leaves the world. Whoever goes forth to his You with his whole being and carries to it all the being of the world, finds him whom one cannot seek.
– How foolish and hopeless must one be to leave one’s way of life to seek God: even if one gained all the wisdom of solitude and all the power of concentration, one would miss him. It is rather as if a man went his way and merely wished that it might be the way; his aspiration finds expression in the strength of his wish.
– Every encounter is a way station that grants him a view of fulfillment
– Ready, not seeking, he goes his way; this gives him the serenity toward all things and the touch that helps them.
– For this finding is not an end of the way but only its eternal center. It is a finding without seeking; a discovery of what is most original and the origin.
– It is not as if God could be inferred from anything—say, from nature as its cause, or from history as its helmsman…This is what confronts us immediately and first and always, and legitimacy it can only be addressed, not asserted.
– However essential one considers a feeling, it still remains subject to the dynamics of the soul where one feeling is surpassed, excelled, and replaced by another; feelings, unlike relationships, can be compared on a scale. Above all, every feeling has its place in a polar tension; it derives its color and meaning not from itself alone but also from its polar opposite; every feeling is conditioned by its opposite.
– Teachings and poems try to say more, and say too much
– “Let your will be done”—is all he says, but truth goes on to say for him: “through me whom you need.” What distinguishes sacrifice and prayer from all magic? Magic wants to be effective without entering into any relationship and performs its arts in the void, while sacrifice and prayer step “before the countenances,” into the perfection of the sacred basic word that signifies reciprocity. They say You and listen.
– First, the soul may become one. This event occurs not between man and God but in man. All forces are concentrated into the core, everything that would distract them is pulled in, and the being stands alone in itself and jubilates, as Paracelsus put it, in its exaltation. This is a man’s decisive moment. Without this he is not fit for the work of the spirit.
– Everything along our way is decision—intentional, dimly sensed, or altogether secret—but this one, deep down, is the primarily secret decision, pregnant with the most powerful destiny.
– Those human beings may serve as a metaphor who in the passion of erotic fulfillment are so carried away by the miracle of the embrace that all knowledge of I and You drowns in the feeling of a unity that neither exists nor can exist. What the ecstatic calls unification is the rapturous dynamics of the relationship; not a unity that has come into being at this moment in world time, fusing I and You, but the dynamics of the relationship itself which can stand before the two carriers of this relationship, although they confront each other immovably, and cover the eyes of the enraptured. What we find here is marginal exorbitance of the act of relation: the relationship itself in its vital unity is felt so vehemently that it members pale in the process: its life predominates so much that I ad You between whom it is established are forgotten.
– We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality that has been given to us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth.
– Theoretically: because perfection is said to elude the categories of thought and assertion. Practically: because the unveiling of such truths would not aid salvation.
– In the envisaged mystery, even as in lived actuality, neither “thus it is” nor “thus it is not” prevails, neither being nor not-being, but rather thus-and-otherwise, being and not-being, the indissoluble. To confront the undivided mystery undivided, that is the primal condition of salvation.
– Like all true teachers, he wishes to teach not a view but the way.
– All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of a human spirit bent back into itself—the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In truth it occurs from man—between man and what he is not.
– Certainly, the world dwells in me as a notion, just as I dwell in it as a thing. But that does not mean that it is in me, just as I am not in it. The world and I include each other reciprocally.
– The self-sense, that which cannot be included in the world, I carry in myself. The being-sense, that which cannot be included in any notion, the world carries in itself.
– But what it depends on is not whether I “affirm” or “negate” the world in my soul, but how I let the attitude of my soul toward the world come to life, life that affects the world, actual life—and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of the soul can cross. But whoever merely has a living “experience” of his attitude and retains it in his soul may be as thoughtful as can be, he is wordless—and all the games, arts, intoxications, enthusiasms, and mysteries that happen within him do not touch the world’s skin.
– Only he that believes in the world achieves contact with it; and if he commits himself he also cannot remain godless. Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms—and our hands encounter the hands that hold it.
– I know nothing of a “world” and of “worldly life” that separates us from God.
– Whoever tries to think a synthesis destroys the sense of the situation.
– The eyes of an animal have the capacity of a great language. Independent, without any need of the assistance of sounds and gestures, most eloquent when they rest entirely in their glance, they express the mystery in its natural captivity, that is, in the anxiety of becoming. This state of the mystery is known only to the animal, which alone can open it up to us—for this state can only be opened up and not revealed. The language in which this is accomplished is what it says: anxiety—the stirring of the creature between the realms of plantlife security and spiritual risk. This language is the stammering of nature under the initial grasp of spirit, before language yields to spirit’s cosmic risk which we call man.
– every individual You must disappear into the chrysalis of the It in order to grow wings.
– But isn’t solitude, too, a portal? Dos it not happen sometimes in the stillest lonesomeness that we unexpectedly behold? Cannot intercourse with oneself change mysteriously into intercourse with mystery?
– but not if we ourselves have forsaken other beings. Only he that is full of covetousness to use them is attached to some of them; he that lives in the strength of the presence can only be associated with them.
– If lonesomeness is the place of purification which even the associate needs before he enters the holy of holies, but which he also needs in the midst of his trials, between his unavoidable failures and his ascent to prove himself—that is how we are constituted. But if it is the castle of separation where man conducts a dialogue with himself, not in order to test himself and master himself for what awaits him but in his enjoyment of the configuration of his own soul—that is the spirit’s lapse into mere spirituality.
– But as surely as God embraces us and dwells in us, we never have him within. And we speak to him only when all speech has ceased within.
– A modern philosopher supposes that every man believes of necessity neither in God or in “idols”—which is to say, some finite good, such as his nation, his art, power, knowledge, the acquisition of money, the “ever repeated triumph with women”—some good that has become an absolute value for him, taking its place between him and God
– Whoever is dominated by the idol whom he wants to acquire, have, and hold, possessed by his desire to possess, can find a way to God only by returning, which involves a change not only of the goal but also of the kind of movement. One can heal the possessed only by awakening and educating him to association, not by directing his possession toward God.
– It is blasphemy when a man whose idol has fallen down behind the altar desires to offer to God the unholy sacrifice that is piled up on the desecrated alter.
– Whoever has been converted by substitution, now “has” a phantom that he calls God. God, however, the eternal presence, cannot be had. Woe unto the possessed who fancy that they possessed God!
– It is said further that the “religious” man steps before God as one who is single, solitary, and detached insofar as he has also transcended the stage of the “ethical” man who still dwells in duty and obligation to the world. The latter is said to be still burdened with responsibility for the actions of agents because he is wholly determined by the tensions between is and ought, and into the unbridgeable gap between both he throws, full of grotesquely hopeless sacrificial courage, piece upon piece of his heart.
– Duties and obligations one has only toward the stranger: toward one’s intimates one is kind and loving.
– “One accepts, one does not ask who gives.” – Nietzsche
– You do not know how to point to or define the meaning, you lack any formula or image for it, and yet it is more certain for you than the sensations of your senses. What could it intend with us, what does it desire from us, being revealed and surreptitious? It does not wish to be interrupted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us. This comes third: it is not the meaning of “another life” but that of this our life, not that of a “beyond” but of this our world, and it wants to be demonstrated by us in this life and this world.
– The meaning we received can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of his being and in the uniqueness of his life. No prescription can lead us to the encounter, and none leads from it. Only the acceptance of the presence is required to come to it or, in a new sense, to go from it.
– That before which we live, that in which we live, that out of which and into which we live, the mystery—has remained what it was.
– By its very nature the eternal You cannot become an It; because by its very nature it cannot be placed within measure and limit, not even within the measure of the immeasurable and the limit of the unlimited; because by its vey nature it cannot be grasped as a sum of qualities, not even as an infinite sum of qualities that have been raised to transcendence; because it is not to be found either in or outside the world;
– The asserted knowledge and the posited action of the religions—whence do they come? The presence and strength of revelation (for all of them necessarily invoke some sort of revelation, whether verbal, natural, or psychic—they are, strictly speaking, only revealed religions),
– Man desires to have God; he desires to have God continually in space and time. He is loath to be satisfied with the inexpressible confirmation of the meaning; he was to see it spread out as something that one can take out and handle again and again
– The encounter with God does not come to man in order that he may henceforth attend to God but in order that he may prove its meaning in action in the world. All revelation is a calling and a mission.
– When you are sent forth, God remains presence for you; whoever walks in his mission always has God before him: the more faithful the fulfillment, the stronger and more constant the nearness.
– The powerful revelations invoked by the religions are essentially the same as the quiet one that occurs everywhere and at all times. The powerful revelations that stand at the beginnings of great communities, at the turning-points of human time, are nothing else than the eternal revelation.
– Whoever is sent forth in a revelation takes with him in his eyes an image of God; however supra-sensible it may be, he take it along in the eyes of his spirit in the altogether not metaphorical but entirely real visual power of his spirit.