Gabriel Marcel: Effectiveness

Gabriel Marcel was French philosopher, playwright, music critic and leading Christian existentialist. Explore interesting quotes on effectiveness.

Gabriel Marcel: 20 quotes12 likes

“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.”

Source: Man Against Mass Society (1952), p. 123

“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.”

Source: Man Against Mass Society (1952), p. 144

“The past, when it is merely known historically (that is, as a subject for abstract study), somehow piles itself up outside our real lives. … I think that one of the duties of a philosopher, if he shows himself worthy of his vocation today, is to attack quite directly those dissimulating forces which are all working toward what might be called the neutralization of the past; and whose conjoint effect consists in arousing in contemporary man a feeling of what I should like to call insulation in time.”

Source: Man Against Mass Society (1952), p. 39