Quotes from Paul Ricoeur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Testimony gives something to be interpreted.

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

The text is a limited field of possible constructions.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Law is one aspect of a much more concrete and encompassing relation than the relation between commanding and obeying that characterizes the imperative.

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.

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.

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

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

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

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