There are people of spirit and there are people of passion, both less common than one might think. Rarer still are the people of spirit and passion. But rarest of all is a passionable spirit.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the rarity of individuals who possess both spirit and passion, suggesting that true greatness comes from combining these qualities.
Martin Buber's quote emphasizes the importance of having both spirit and passion in one's approach to life. While many people may have either trait, those who embody both, and particularly a 'passionable spirit', are exceedingly rare. This combination allows for a deeper engagement with life and a more profound impact on the world around them, suggesting that such individuals are uniquely equipped to inspire and lead others.
In practice
In a motivational speech to inspire students to pursue their passions.
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.
But far more numerous was the herd of such, Who think too little, and who talk too much.
Passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever.
The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
It is said that if Noah's ark had to be built by a company; they would not have laid the keel yet; and it may be so. What is many men's business is nobody's business. The greatest things are accomplished by individual men.
Obviously, a man's judgement cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning processes, and make him something less than a man.
That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless
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