Gabriel Marcel Quotations

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

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

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

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

Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.

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

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.

Contemporary thinkers would say that man is continuously transcending himself.

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

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

Metaphysics is a science.

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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