Paul Ricoeur Quotations

For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding.

If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal.

The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism.

Testimony should be a philosophical problem and not limited to legal or historical contexts where it refers to the account of a witness who reports what he has seen.

So long as the New Testament served to decipher the Old, it was taken as an absolute norm.

This is perhaps the most profound meaning of the book of Job, the best example of wisdom.

On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.

The moral law commands us to make the highest possible good in a world the final object of all our conduct.

The text is a limited field of possible constructions.

Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder

It is always possible to argue against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them and to seek for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach.

Hope, insofar as it is hope of resurrection, is the living contradiction of what it proceeds from and what is placed under the sign of the Cross and death.

If the Resurrection is resurrection from the dead, all hope and freedom are in spite of death.

Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence.

What must be the nature of the world... if human beings are able to introduce changes into it?

The narrative constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told. It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character.

Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it

Man is this plural and collective unity in which the unity of destination and the differences of destinies are to be understood through each other

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

There is no shorter path for joining a neutral existential anthropology, according to philosophy, with the existential decision before God, according to the Bible.

Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner.

Although there has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity, the hermeneutic question today seems to us a new one.

There has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity because Christianity proceeds from a proclamation.

First, it is not unimportant that the legislative texts of the Old Testament are placed in the mouth of Moses and within the narrative framework of the sojourn at Sinai.

The Law is one aspect of a much more concrete and encompassing relation than the relation between commanding and obeying that characterizes the imperative.

But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny. Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence. Hence to demythologize is to interpret myth, that is, to relate the objective representations of the myth to the self-understanding which is both shown and concealed in it.

This atheism concerning the gods of men pertains hereafter to any possible faith

Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.

Testimony gives something to be interpreted.

The dictionary contains no metaphors.

The spectacle is at the same time the mirage of self in the mirror of things.

To put it in a few words, the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.

If you want to change people's obedience then you must change their imagination.

We are not capable of producing a concept of time that is at once cosmological, biological, historical and individual

I find myself only by losing myself.

There was a wise old owl who sat in a tree The less he spoke the more he heard The more he heard the less he spoke Why can't we be like that wise old owl in the tree? Speech must die to serve that which is spoken.