Maurice Stanley Friedman

"Today the tempter does not lead the creative man to a high mountain to show him all the kingdoms and splendor of the world, as Satan did to Jesus. Instead he tempts him through infinity — to lose himself in the inessential, to roam about in' the great confusion in which all human clarity and definiteness has ceased. Thus the threat of infinity which Buber experienced as a fifteen-year-old now takes on new form — the form of formlessness, of the whirl of unmastered possibilities which every young person who goes out into the world experiences, but which Buber himself experienced to an overwhelming degree."