Top 20 Quotes & Sayings by Gabriel Marcel

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French philosopher Gabriel Marcel.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Gabriel Honoré Marcel was a French philosopher, playwright, music critic and leading Christian existentialist. The author of over a dozen books and at least thirty plays, Marcel's work focused on the modern individual's struggle in a technologically dehumanizing society. Though often regarded as the first French existentialist, he dissociated himself from figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, preferring the term philosophy of existence or neo-Socrateanism to define his own thought. The Mystery of Being is a well-known two-volume work authored by Marcel.

French - Philosopher | December 7, 1889 - October 8, 1973

Source: Wikipedia

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

Gabriel Marcel

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

Gabriel Marcel

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

Contemporary thinkers would say that man is continuously transcending himself.

Gabriel Marcel

Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.

Gabriel Marcel

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

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

Gabriel Marcel

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

Gabriel Marcel

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

Gabriel Marcel

Metaphysics is a science.

Gabriel Marcel

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

Gabriel Marcel

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

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

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

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

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

Gabriel Marcel

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

Gabriel Marcel

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