Gabriel Marcel Quotes

#1. A mystery is a problem that encroaches upon itself because the questioner becomes the object of the question. Getting to Mars is a problem. Falling in love is a mystery.

Gabriel Marcel

#2. Freedom is a conquest, always partial, always precarious, always challenged ... the freest person is the one with the most hope.

Gabriel Marcel

#3. It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics.

Gabriel Marcel

#4. You know you have loved someone when you have glimpsed in them that which is too beautiful to die.

Gabriel Marcel

#5. But a science is exact to the extent that its method measures up to and is adequate to its object.

Gabriel Marcel

#6. I almost think that hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism. Where hope is lacking the soul dries up and withers ...

Gabriel Marcel

#7. Being and having in our society teaches us how to take possession of things, when it should rather initiate us in the art of letting go. For there is neither freedom nor real life without an apprenticeship in letting go.

Gabriel Marcel

#8. I not only have a body; I am this body.

Gabriel Marcel

#9. Contemplation and wisdom are highest achievements and man is not totally at home with them.

Gabriel Marcel

#10. Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.

Gabriel Marcel

#11. On a grassroots level we say that man can touch more than he can grasp.

Gabriel Marcel

#12. The atheist relies not on an experience but on an idea, or pseudo idea, of God: if God existed, He would have such and such characteristics; but if he had such characteristics, He could not allow etc...His judgment of incompability, in fact, is based on a judgment of implications.

Gabriel Marcel

#13. An individual is not distinct from his place. He is his place.

Gabriel Marcel

#14. Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me

Gabriel Marcel

#15. Metaphysics is a science.

Gabriel Marcel

#16. But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.

Gabriel Marcel

#17. This detachment (poverty, chastity, etc.) must not be mere amputation; everything which is shaken off must be simultaneously found again at a higher level.

Gabriel Marcel

#18. Contemporary thinkers would say that man is continuously transcending himself.

Gabriel Marcel

#19. The striking thing about the Precious Blood is the bond it establishes between love and suffering in our experience, a bond that has become so close that we have come to think of suffering accepted with joy as the most authentic sign of love with any depth at all.

Gabriel Marcel

#20. The wise man knows how to run his life so that contemplation is Possible.

Gabriel Marcel

#21. The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.

Gabriel Marcel

#22. It is impossible to exaggerate how much better the formula es denkt in mir is than cogito ergo sum, which lets us in for pure subjectivism.

Gabriel Marcel