Richard Kearney Quotes

#1. If it is indeed the business of imagination to make politics distrust itself - reminding it that its principles are not literal facts but constructs of imagination - it is also its business to encourage politics to remake itself by remaking its images of the good life.

Richard Kearney

#2. The only Messiah still credible after the death camps would be one who wanted to come but could not because humans failed to invite the sacred stranger into existence.

Richard Kearney

#3. While food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.

Richard Kearney

#4. The storied self knows that self is not enough.

Richard Kearney

#5. If it is true that we cannot possess knowledge of what is good in any absolute sense, it is equally true that we have an ethical duty to decide between what is better and what is worse.

Richard Kearney

#6. Clearly, imagining cannot be expected to mean exactly the same thing today as it did in the Middle Ages or antiquity. For one thing, Aristotle and Aquinas never watched television.

Richard Kearney

#7. If we possess narrative sympathy - enabling us to see the world from other's point of view - we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love.

Richard Kearney