- In the beginning is the relationship.
- A real relationship is where I stand with her: she works on me as I work on her.
- All real life is encountering.
- The You meets me by grace – by searching it is not found.
- Feelings are “had”; love happens. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. This is not a metaphor but reality: love does not adhere to the “I” so that it would only have the “You” as its “content”, as its object; it is between I and You.
- Love is the responsibility of an I for a Thou: herein consists, which cannot exist in any feeling, the equality of all lovers, from the smallest to the greatest, and from the blessedly born, whose life is decided in that of a beloved person, to the one who has been beaten to the cross of the world for a long time, who is able and dares the monstrous: to love the people.
- As long as love is “blind”, that is, as long as it does not see a whole being, it is not yet truly under the fundamental word of relationship.
- The Thou knows no coordinate system.
- Spirit in its human manifestation is man’s answer to his You.
- Spirit is not in the I, but between the I and the Thou.
- The dogma does not know the man who overcomes all-struggle by conversion; who tears apart the web of the utilitarian instincts by conversion; who frees himself from the spell of class by conversion; who stirs up, rejuvenates, and transforms the secure historical formations by conversion. The dogma of the sequence of events leaves you only the choice before his board game: observe the rules or eliminate, but the inverter overturns the pieces. The dogma, after all, wants to allow you to execute the conditionality with life and to “remain free” in the soul, but this freedom the repentant considers it to be the most shameful bondage.
- The free man is the one who wants without arbitrariness.
- He believes, I said, but by that is said: he encounters.
- The unbelieving marrow of the arbitrary man can perceive nothing else than unbelief and arbitrariness, purpose and mediocrity. Without sacrifice and without grace, without encounter and without presence, a branched and mediated world is his world; no other can be; and this is called doom.
- The purpose of the relationship is its own essence, that is: the touch of the You. For through the touch of each Thou, a breath of eternal life touches us.
- The extended lines of relationships intersect in the eternal you.
- Love itself cannot remain in the immediate relationship; it lasts, but in the alternation of actuality and latency.
- But the event whose world side is called conversion, whose God side is called salvation.