Paul Ricœur Quotes

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 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.

~ Paul Ricœur

With guilt there arises indeed a sort of demand which can be called scrupulosity and whose ambiguous character is extremely interesting. A scrupulous consciousness is a delicate consciousness, a precise consciousness, enamored of increasing perfection... This atomization of the law into a multitude of commandments entails an endless 'juridization' of action and a quasi-obsessional ritualization of daily life... With it we enter into the hell of guilt, such as St. Paul described it: the law itself becomes a source of sin.

~ Paul Ricœur

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

~ Paul Ricœur

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

~ Paul Ricœur

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 Ricœur