Best 30 quotes of Paul Ricoeur on MyQuotes

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

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

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.

But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The dictionary contains no metaphors.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

Even if guilt is not originary, it is forever radical. It is the adherence of guilt to the human condition that, it seems, renders it not only unforgivable in fact, but unforgivable by right. Stripping guilt from our existence would, it seems, destroy the existence totally

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.

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.