Ricoeur Quotes

#1. Man enters into the ethical world through fear and not through love. - Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil.

Tami Hoag

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

Paul Ricoeur

#3. 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

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

Paul Ricoeur

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

Paul Ricoeur

#9. 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

#10. The dictionary contains no metaphors.

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

#13. 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

#14. 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

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

#17. 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

#18. I find myself only by losing myself.

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

#20. The text is a limited field of possible constructions.

Paul Ricoeur

#21. 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

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

#24. 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

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

Paul Ricoeur

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. Beneath history, memory and forgetting
Beneath memory and forgetting, life.

Paul Ricoeur

#30. Testimony gives something to be interpreted.

Paul Ricoeur

#31. Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

#35. 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

#36. 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

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

Paul Ricoeur

#38. 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