52 Quotes by Paul Ricœur

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.