Daily Inspiration Quote by Martin Buber

Buber turns a sentimental observation into a quiet rebuke of how modern people train themselves not to listen. “An animal’s eyes” isn’t just a cute detail; it’s a philosophical shortcut into his signature idea that the deepest kind of relationship is direct encounter, not categorization. You can file an animal under species, utility, “pet,” “pest,” “livestock” - and still miss the presence looking back at you. The eyes force the issue: you’re either addressed by a living being or you’re safely monologuing at an object.

The phrase “power to speak” is doing heavy lifting. Buber refuses the assumption that language equals words, and that meaning belongs only to humans. He’s pointing to a pre-verbal channel of recognition: attention, fear, trust, curiosity. In that sense the “great language” is less about decoding what the animal “means” and more about what the encounter demands of you - a kind of ethical literacy. If you can register that look without translating it into ownership or amusement, you’ve stepped out of I-It (the world of things) and into I-Thou (the world of relation).

Context matters: writing in an era shaped by industrial slaughter, mechanization, and bureaucratic thinking, Buber’s line reads as a small act of resistance. It insists that the border between “person” and “mere creature” is thinner than we like to believe. The animal’s gaze becomes a test of our humanity: not whether we can speak, but whether we can be spoken to.