All real living is meeting

To address another as Thou, Buber suggests, requires a certain self-surrender that springs from inhabiting one’s own presence while at the same time stepping outside one’s self.

Only then does the other cease to be a means to one’s own ends and becomes real. 

The primary word I–Thou can be spoken only with the whole being.

Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me.

I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou.

Relationship is what makes a forest a forest and an ocean an ocean. 

To meet the world on its own terms and respect the r...