Top 41 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Ricoeur

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French philosopher Paul Ricoeur.

Last updated on November 8, 2024.

Jean Paul Gustave Ricœur was a French philosopher best known for combining phenomenological description with hermeneutics. As such, his thought is within the same tradition as other major hermeneutic phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Gabriel Marcel. In 2000, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for having "revolutionized the methods of hermeneutic phenomenology, expanding the study of textual interpretation to include the broad yet concrete domains of mythology, biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, theory of metaphor, and narrative theory."

French - Philosopher | February 27, 1913 - May 20, 2005

Source: Wikipedia

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

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

The text is a limited field of possible constructions.

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

Testimony gives something to be interpreted.

Paul Ricoeur

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

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

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

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

Paul Ricoeur

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

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

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

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

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

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

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

Paul Ricoeur

The dictionary contains no metaphors.

Paul Ricoeur

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

Paul Ricoeur

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