Gabriel Marcel Quotes
Gabriel Marcel was a French Catholic existentialist philosopher, dramatist, and music critic. Often called the first French existentialist, he distinguished his thought sharply from Sartre's atheist existentialism, preferring the term Christian neo-Socratism. The quotes below are attributed to Gabriel Marcel, organized by topic.
Browse Gabriel Marcel by topic
Gabriel Marcel on Death
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“The great pessimists in the history of thought [...] have prepared our minds to understand that despair can be what it was for Nietzsche (though on an infra-ontological level and in a domain fraught with mortal dangers) the springboard to the loftiest affirmation.”
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Gabriel Marcel on God
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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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Gabriel Marcel on Happiness
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Attributed to Gabriel Marcel:
“Hope is for the soul what breath is for the body.”
Gabriel Marcel on Knowledge
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“Being is - or should be - necessary.”
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“When the pessimist Besme says in La Ville that nothing is, he means precisely this, that there is no experience that withstands the analytical test.”
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“No doubt I shall be told: "In the immense majority of cases this is an illusion." But it is of the essence of hope to exlclude the consideration of cases; moreover, it can be shown that there exists an ascedning dialectic of hope, whereby hope rises to a plane which transcends the level of all possible empirical disproof - the plane of salvation as opposed to that of success in whatever form”
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“speaking metaphysically, the only genuine hope is hope in what does not depend on ourselves, hope springing from humility and not from pride.”
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Gabriel Marcel on Life
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“Life in a world centred on function is liable to dispair because in reality the world is empty, it rings hollow; and if it resist this temptation it is only to the extent that there comes into plat from within it and in its favour certain hidden forces which are beyond its power to conceive or to recognise.”
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“the world we live in permits - and may even seem to counsel - absolute dispair, yet it is only such a world that can give rise to an unconquerable hope.”
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“We are living in a world which seems to be founded on the refusal to reflect.”
Man Against Mass Society(1952) | p. 132 -
“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.”
Man Against Mass Society(1952) | p. 144
Gabriel Marcel on Love
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Attributed to Gabriel Marcel:
“Fidelity is the active recognition of something permanent.”
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Attributed to Gabriel Marcel:
“I hope in thee for us.”
Gabriel Marcel on Mind
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Attributed to Gabriel Marcel:
“The intellect's deepest task is to safeguard the mystery.”
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“Is there such a thing as being? What is it? etc. Yet immediately an abyss opens under my feet: I who ask these questions about being, how can I be sure that I exist? Yet surely I, who formulate this problem should be able to remain outside it - before or beyond it? Clearly this is not so. The more I consider it the more I find that this problem tends inevitably to invade the proscenium from which it is excluded in theory: it is only by means of a fiction that Idealism in its traditional form seeks to maintain on the margin of being the consciousness which asserts or denies it.”
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“I am therefore led to assume or to recognise a form of participation which has the reality of a subject; this participation cannot be, by definition, an object of thought; it cannot serve as a solution - it appears beyond the realm of problems: it is metaproblematical.”
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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.”
Man Against Mass Society(1952) | p. 143 -
“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.”
Man Against Mass Society(1952) | p. 123
Gabriel Marcel on Truth
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Attributed to Gabriel Marcel:
“Being and having are the two fundamental categories of existence.”
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Attributed to Gabriel Marcel:
“A philosopher must accept the mystery of being.”