Great Throughts Treasury

"We cannot avoid using power, cannot escape the compulsion to aflict the world so let us, cautious in diction and mighty in contradiction, love powerfully."

"God made so many different kinds of people. Why would he allow only one way to serve him?"

"All this and its like is the basis of the realm of It."

"All actual life is encounter."

"A person cannot approach the divine by reaching beyond the human. To become human, is what this individual person, has been created for."

"All revelation is summons and sending."

"And in all the seriousness of truth, listen: without It a human being cannot live. But whoever lives only with that is not human."

"As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and the whirl of doom congeals. The human being to whom I say You I do not experience. But i stand in relation to him, in the sacred basic word. Only when I step out of this do I experience him again. Experience is remoteness from You."

"Basic words are spoken with one?s being."

"Basic words do not state something that might exist outside them; by being spoken they establish a mode of existence."

"Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?"

"Being I and saying I are the same. Saying I and saying one of the two basic words are the same."

"And if there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision."

"All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him."

"An animal?s eyes have the power to speak a great language."

"An example may clarify more precisely the relation between the psychologist and the anthropologist. If both of them investigate, say, the phenomenon of anger, the psychologist will try to grasp what the angry man feels, what his motives and the impulses of his will are, but the anthropologist will also try to grasp what he is doing. In respect of this phenomenon self-observation, being by nature disposed to weaken the spontaneity and unruliness of anger, will be especially difficult for both of them. The psychologist will try to meet this difficulty by a specific division of consciousness, which enables him to remain outside with the observing part of his being and yet let his passion run its course as undisturbed as possible. Of course this passion can then not avoid becoming similar to that of the actor, that is, though it can still be heightened in comparison with an unobserved passion its course will be different: there will be a release which is willed and which takes the place of the elemental outbreak, there will be a vehemence which will be more emphasized, more deliberate, more dramatic. The anthropologist can have nothing to do with a division of consciousness, since he has to do with the unbroken wholeness of events, and especially with the unbroken natural connection between feelings and actions; and this connection is most powerfully influenced in self-observation, since the pure spontaneity of the action is bound to suffer essentially. It remains for the anthropologist only to resign any attempt to stay outside his observing self, and thus when he is overcome by anger not to disturb it in its course by becoming a spectator of it, but to let it rage to its conclusion without trying to gain a perspective. He will be able to register in the act of recollection what he felt and did then; for him memory takes the place of psychological self-experience. ... In the moment of life he has nothing else in his mind but just to live what is to be lived, he is there with his whole being, undivided, and for that very reason there grows in his thought and recollection the knowledge of human wholeness."

"As experience, the world belongs to the primary word I-It."

"But it is not experiences alone that bring the world to man."

"Each of us is encased in an armor which we soon, out of familiarity, cease to notice. There are only moments which penetrate it and stir the soul to sensibility."

"But the world is not presented to man by experiences alone. These present him only with a world composed of It and He and She and It again."

"Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos."

"But the realm of You has another basis."

"Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God - such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is now passing"

"But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partially of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found?"

"Creation happens to us, burns into us, changes us, we tremble and swoon, we submit. Creation - we participate in it, we encounter the creator, offer ourselves to him, helpers and companions."

"Dialogic is not to be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, the love remaining with itself - this is called Lucifer."

"But this is the exalted melancholy of our fate that every Thou in our world must become an It. It does not matter how exclusively present the Thou was in the direct relation. As soon as the relation has been worked out or has been permeated with a means, the Thou becomes an object among objects ? perhaps the chief, but still one of them, fixed in its size and its limits. In the work of art realization in one sense means loss of reality in another. Genuine contemplation is over in a short time; now the life in nature, that first unlocked itself to me in the mystery of mutual action, can again be described, taken to pieces, and classified ? the meeting-point of manifold systems of laws. And love itself cannot persist in direct relation. It endures, but in interchange of actual and potential being. The human being who was even now single and unconditioned, not something lying to hand, only present, not able to be experienced, only able to be fulfilled, has now become again a He or a She, a sum of qualities, a given quantity with a certain shape. Now I may take out from him again the colour of his hair or of his speech or of his goodness. But so long as I can do this he is no more my Thou and cannot yet be my Thou again."

"Every person born in this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique and every man or woman's foremost task is the actualization of his or her unique, unprecedented and never recurring possibilities."

"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."

"Every Thou in the world is by its nature fated to become a thing, or continually re-enter into the condition of things. In objective speech it would be said that everything in the world, either before or after becoming a thing, is able to appear to an I as its Thou. But objective speech snatches only at a fringe of real life."

"Every You in the world is doomed by its nature to become a thing or at least to enter into thinghood again and again. In the language of objects: everything in the world can ? either before or after it becomes a thing ? appear to some I and its You. But the language of objects catches only one corner of actual life."

"Feeling one has; love occurs."

"Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor, but the actual truth. Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its content, its object; but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses."

"For the I of the primary word I-Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I-It."

"Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way."

"For what they bring to him is only a world that consists of It and It and It, of He and He and She and She and It. . . ."

"For the I of the basic word I-You is different from that of the basic word I-It."

"God can be addressed, but not expressed."

"God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being and with the quality peculiar to human beings."

"God is the "mysterium tremendum," that appears and overthrows, but he is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I."

"He is no longer He or She, limited by other Hes and Shes, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition that can be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is You and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light. . . ."

"Hence the I of man is also twofold."

"He who loves a woman, and brings her life to present realization in his, is able to look in the Thou of her eyes into a beam of the eternal Thou."

"Here the relations is wrapped in a cloud but reveals itself, it lacks but creates language. We hear no You and yet addressed; we answer - creating, thinking, acting: with our being we speak the basic word, unable to say You with our mouth. But how can we incorporate into the world of the basic word that lies outside language?"

"How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you - for that is the meaning of your life."

"I can look on (a tree) as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background. I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pitch, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air - and the obscure growth itself. I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life. I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognize it only as an expression of law... I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number... In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution. It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness."

"I do not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolutes, but on a narrow, rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but [only] the certainty of meeting what remains, undisclosed."

"I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou."

"I don't like religion much, and I am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found."

"I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me."