Relation As Reciprocity: The Dialogical Theology of Martin Buber

"Relation Is Reciprocity."

“The basic word I-Thou can only be spoken with one's whole being.
The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one's whole being.”

‎"The form that confronts me I cannot experience or describe; I can only actualize it... radiant in the splendor of the confrontation... Such work is creation, inventing is finding."

"Feelings accompany the metaphysical and metapsychical fact of love, but they do not constitute it... 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 Thou were merely its 'content' or object; it is between Thou and I."

"Spirit is not in the I, but between I and Thou... Man lives in the spirit when he is able to respond to his Thou... It is solely by virtue of his power to relate that man is able to live in the spirit."

"True community does not come into being because people have feelings for each other, 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 community is built upon a living, reciprocal relationship, but the builder is the living, active center."

"The purpose of a relation is the relation itself - touching the Thou. For as soon as we touch a Thou, we are touched by a breath of eternal life. Whoever stands in relation participates in an actuality; that is, in a being that is neither merely a part of him nor merely outside him."

"Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons."

"Every great culture that embraces more than one people rests on some original encounter, an event at the source when a response was made to a Thou... Reinforced by the energy of subsequent generations... this creates a distinctive conception of the cosmos in the spirit [and] a human cosmos becomes possible again and again."

"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."

"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."

I and Thou by Martin Buber