Paul Ricoeur Quotes

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

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.

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

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

I find myself only by losing myself.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

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

Testimony gives something to be interpreted.

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.

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

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

The dictionary contains no metaphors.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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