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Avoid melancholy with all your might. It hurts the service of God more than sin. Satan takes less pleasure in sin than in a man's melancholy over having sinned again and so feeling that he is a slave to sin. Thus the Evil One has caught the poor soul in the net of despair.

— Martin Buber For The Sake of Heaven (1945)

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Sadness

More quotes by Martin Buber

All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.

I and Thou (1923)

The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.

Encounter with Martin Buber (1972)

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1955)

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.

Between Man and Man (1965)

When we see a great man desiring power instead of his real goal we soon recognize that he is sick, or more precisely that his attitude to his work is sick.

What is Man? (1938)

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Life could not be lived wet, whether it be in rain or tears.

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In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

Solomon

In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.

Abraham Lincoln

Every joy that some experience is paid for by the sorrow of others.

Kaneko Fumiko The Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman (1991)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Martin Buber (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.