Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Beneath history, memory and forgetting Beneath memory and forgetting, life.

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.

I find myself only by losing myself.

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.

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

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.

The dictionary contains no metaphors.

La fedeltà al passato non è un dato bensì un voto. Come tutti i voti può essere deluso, o tradito

There is also present in every human being, in everyone's biography-although sometimes harrowing cases of systematic neglect, present in the matter of absence, so if longing for that which never was there then too, deeply suspect, should have been.

Nous devons devenir capables d'échanger nos mémoires nationales ou ethniques et d'exercer les uns à l'égard des autres à la fois la volonté de ne pas oublier et celle de pardonner, c'est-à-dire de libérer la mémoire des autres de sa charge de culpabilité

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

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.

Language is for itself the order of the Same. The world is its Other. The attestation of this otherness arises from language's reflexivity with regard to itself, whereby it knows itself as being in being in order to bear on being.

History may always become a kind of evasion of the search for truth. It is always possible to hide behind history so as to affirm nothing on one's own account...Ultimately, the skeptical historian no longer searches for anything, and the dogmatic philosopher has nothing but enemies or students but never friends.

It is not only the arduousness of the effort of memory that confers this unsettling character upon the relation, but the fear of having forgotten, of continuing to forget, of forgetting tomorrow to fulfill some task or other; for tomorrow, one must not forget...to remember.

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

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

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.