Gabriel Marcel Quotes

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

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

I know by my own experience how, from a stranger met by chance, there may come an irresistible appeal which overturns the habitual perspectives just as a gust of wind might tumble down the panels of a stage set - what had seemed near becomes infinitely remote and what had seemed distant seems to be close.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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 ...

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.

Metaphysics is a science.

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

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.

My freedom is not and cannot be something that I observe as I observe an outward fact; rather it must be something that I decide, moreover, without appeal. It is beyond the power of anyone to reject the decision by which I assert my freedom and this assertion is ultimately bound up with the consciousness that I have of myself.