1.
The logic of validation allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism.
Paul Ricoeur
2.
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
3.
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
4.
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
5.
If you want to change people's obedience then you must change their imagination.
Paul Ricoeur
6.
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
7.
I find myself only by losing myself.
Paul Ricoeur
8.
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
9.
If the Resurrection is resurrection from the dead, all hope and freedom are in spite of death.
Paul Ricoeur
10.
We are not capable of producing a concept of time that is at once cosmological, biological, historical and individual
Paul Ricoeur
11.
The moral law commands us to make the highest possible good in a world the final object of all our conduct.
Paul Ricoeur
12.
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
13.
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
14.
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
15.
Although there has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity, the hermeneutic question today seems to us a new one.
Paul Ricoeur
16.
Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it
Paul Ricoeur
17.
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
18.
Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.
Paul Ricoeur
19.
The spectacle is at the same time the mirage of self in the mirror of things.
Paul Ricoeur
20.
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
21.
Testimony gives something to be interpreted.
Paul Ricoeur
22.
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
23.
Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.
Paul Ricoeur
24.
So long as the New Testament served to decipher the Old, it was taken as an absolute norm.
Paul Ricoeur
25.
Narrative identity takes part in the story's movement, in the dialectic between order and disorder
Paul Ricoeur
26.
The dictionary contains no metaphors.
Paul Ricoeur
27.
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.
Paul Ricoeur
28.
But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny.
Paul Ricoeur
29.
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
30.
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
31.
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
32.
This is perhaps the most profound meaning of the book of Job, the best example of wisdom.
Paul Ricoeur
33.
This atheism concerning the gods of men pertains hereafter to any possible faith
Paul Ricoeur