32 Quotes by Gabriel Marcel

... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.