Paul Ricoeur Quotes & Sayings

The dictionary contains no metaphors. — Paul Ricoeur

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

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

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

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

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. — Paul Ricoeur

With guilt there arises indeed a sort of demand which can be called scrupulosity and whose ambiguous character is extremely interesting. A scrupulous consciousness is a delicate consciousness, a precise consciousness, enamored of increasing perfection ... This atomization of the law into a multitude of commandments entails an endless 'juridization' of action and a quasi-obsessional ritualization of daily life ... With it we enter into the hell of guilt, such as St. Paul described it: the law itself becomes a source of sin. — Paul Ricoeur

We must recognize the fact that philosophy at the present time is entirely at an impasse concerning the problem of the origin of values. This theoretical failure is reflected in the practical antinomy between submission and rebellion that infects the daily concerns of education, politics, and ethics. If no decision can be made at this level, we must retrace our steps, extricate ourselves from the impasse, and try to gain access, by means of a nonethical approach, to the problem of autonomy and obedience. — Paul Ricoeur

I believe that we are henceforth incapable of returning to an order of moral life which would take the form of a simple submission to commandments or to an alien or supreme will, even if this will were represented as divine. We must accept as a positive good the critique of ethics and religion that has been undertaken by the school of suspicion. From it we have learned to understand that the commandment that gives death, not life, is a product and projection of our own weakness. — Paul Ricoeur

Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it. — Paul Ricoeur

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. — Paul Ricoeur

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature. — Paul Ricoeur

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

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. — Paul Ricoeur

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

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. — Paul Ricoeur

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. — Paul Ricoeur

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

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

The power of impulses which haunt our phantasies, of imaginary modes of being which ignite the poetic word, and of the all-embracing, that most powerful something which menaces us so long as we feel unloved, in all these registers and perhaps in others as well, the dialectic of power and form takes place, which insures that language only captures the foam on the surface of life. — Paul Ricoeur

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. — Paul Ricoeur

I find myself only by losing myself. — Paul Ricoeur

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

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

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

There is also present in every human being, in everyone's biography-although sometimes harrowing cases of systematic neglect, present in the matter of absence, so if longing for that which never was there then too, deeply suspect, should have been. — Paul Ricoeur

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. — Paul Ricoeur

Beneath history, memory and forgetting
Beneath memory and forgetting, life. — Paul Ricoeur

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

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

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. — Paul Ricoeur

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

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. — Paul Ricoeur

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. — Paul Ricoeur

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

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. — Paul Ricoeur

Guilt cannot, in fact, express itself, except in the indirect language of "captivity" and "infection," inherited from the two prior stages. Thus both symbols are transposed "inward" to express a freedom that enslaves itself, affects itself, and infects itself by its own choice. Conversely, the symbolic and non-literal character of the captivity of sin and the infection of defilement becomes quite clear when these symbols are used to denote a dimension of freedom itself; then and only then do we know that they are symbols, when they reveal a situation that is centered in the relation of oneself to oneself. Why this recourse to the prior symbolism? Because the paradox of a captive free will - the paradox of a servile will - is insupportable for thought. That freedom must be delivered and that this deliverance is deliverance from self-enslavement cannot be said directly; yet it is the central theme of "salvation — Paul Ricoeur

Testimony gives something to be interpreted. — Paul Ricoeur

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

The text is a limited field of possible constructions. — Paul Ricoeur

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. — Paul Ricoeur

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. — Paul Ricoeur

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. — Paul Ricoeur