Martin Buber Faces Quotations

The work produced is a thing among things, able to be experienced and described as a sum of qualities. But from time to time it can face the receptive beholder in its whole embodied form.

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.

The tradition of the camp fire faces that of the pyramid.

The historical religions have the tendency to become ends in themselves, and, as it were, to put themselves in God's place, and, in fact, there is nothing that is so apt to obscure God's face as a religion.

Real faith means holding ourselves open to the unconditional mystery which we encounter in every sphere of our life and which cannot be comprised in any formula. Real faith means the ability to endure life in the face of this mystery.

Nothing so tends to mask the face of God as religion; it can be a substitute for God himself.