To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.
Interpretation
Understanding the divine involves seeing the world through a spiritual lens rather than simply ignoring it.
In this quote, Martin Buber emphasizes the importance of perceiving the divine presence in the world around us. He suggests that merely avoiding worldly distractions or obsessively focusing on them does not bring one closer to God; rather, it is through recognizing the spiritual significance embedded within the world that one can truly experience the divine presence.
In practice
During a philosophical discussion about spirituality and existence.
When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.
Play is the exultation of the possible.
There is no room for God in him who is full of himself.
Every person born in this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique.
It is usual to think of good and evil as two poles, two opposite directions, the antithesis of one another...We must begin by doing away with this convention.
God dwells wherever man lets Him in.
Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent natural regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.
Great men are seldom over-scrupulous in the arrangement of their attire.
Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?
Gayness is built into Batman. I'm not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay.
It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country to decide, by their conduct and example, the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.
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