Gabriel Marcel Quotes
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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
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... freedom is a conquest, always partial, always precarious, always challenged. ... the freest person is the one with the most hope.
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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.
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It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics.
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Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.
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The wise man knows how to run his life so that contemplation is Possible.
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The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.
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Contemplation and wisdom are highest achievements and man is not totally at home with them.
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But a science is exact to the extent that its method measures up to and is adequate to its object.
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But however measurable, there is much more life in music than mathematics or logic ever dreamed of.
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It would be relevant … to point out the sinister part played by speed, by belief in speed as a value, by, in a word, a kind of impatience that has had a profound effect in changing even the very rhythms of the life of the spirit for the worse.
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Metaphysics is a science.
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The greatest merit of the critical spirit is that it tends to cure fanaticism, and it is logical enough that in our own fanatical times the critical spirit should tend to disappear.
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Contemporary thinkers would say that man is continuously transcending himself.
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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.
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There can be no whole without a thought which grasps it as a whole; and this grasping of what is before the mind as a whole can be effected only by a sort of voluntary halt in a kind of progressive movement of thought.
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On a grassroots level we say that man can touch more than he can grasp.
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This detachment (poverty, chastity, etc.) must not be mere amputation; everything which is shaken off must be simultaneously found again at a higher level.
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We are living in a world which seems to be founded on the refusal to reflect.
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No two beings, and no two situations, are really commensurable with each other. To become aware of this fact is to undergo a sort of crisis. But it is with this crisis in our moral awareness as a starting-point, that there becomes possible that cry from us towards the creative principle, and that demand by it on us, which each must answer in his own way.
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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.
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No philosopher would be willing to accept the idea of philosophy as a way of escape, but might there not be a question of the philosopher being in duty bound to refuse to accept a world, like our real world here, of disorder and crime where the values of the mind and spirit can no longer find a home?
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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.