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.

All actual life is encounter.

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.

Solitude is the place of purification.

We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.

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

To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin.

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

For sin is just this, what man cannot by its very nature do with his whole being; it is possible to silence the conflict in the soul, but it is not possible to uproot it

Play is the exultation of the possible.

the fact that every people feel itself threatened by the others gives the state it’s definite unifying powers; it depends upon the instinct of self-preservation of society itself; the latent external crisis enables it to...

There are three principles in a man’s being and life, the principle of thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that...

I dont like religion much, and I am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found.

Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists – that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education. Because this human being exists, meaninglessness, however hard pressed you are by it,...

The law is not thrust upon man; it rests deep within him, to waken when the call comes.

The one who count are those persons who-though they may be of little renown-respond to and are responsible for the continuation of the living spirit.

When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.

Power abdicates only under the stress of counter-power.

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

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.

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

Through the Thou a person becomes I.

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

Through the Thou a person becomes I

But a person, I would say, is an individual living really with the world. And ‘with’ the world, I don’t mean in the world- just in real contact, in real reciprocity with the world in...

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...

The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

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

The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.

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