Paul Ricoeur Quotes

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.

I find myself only by losing myself.

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.

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

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.

Living is already having been born, in a condition we have not chosen, a situation in which we find ourselves, a quarter of the universe in which we may feel we have been thrown and are wandering, lost. And yet it is against this background that we can begin, that is to say, give a new course to things.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The dictionary contains no metaphors.

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

Testimony gives something to be interpreted.

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.

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.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

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

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

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