Paul Ricoeur Quotes

What hermeneutics teaches is that progress comes from being exposed to different points of views because there's no point of view that is right for all situations and all times. And even if it's superior to the others, you can enrich it by drawing on others or thinking: "Why is that wrong and how do I improve my approach? How do I come up with a better approach?" So that's essential for innovation just like it is in technology.

There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day.

To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy

emotion clouds the rational, and many perspectives guide the full reality. To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy. It is to know the past and to use such relevant history as a template for expectations. It is, most of all, to force reason ahead of instinct, to refuse to demonize that which you hate, and to, most of all, accept your own fallibility.

I think sometimes a part requires more than one approach or thought.

Instead of silencing speakers on campus, perhaps do what you're supposed to in college instead: listen to someone who thinks differently than you do.

I think we could benefit from world history that is specifically taught in a multi-faceted fashion that allows for an understanding that perspectives on truth can be very different.

We all look at the same object in different ways.

The beauty of cricket is that there are so many different opinions as to the best way to do something and at times it is easier to see something when you're not emotionally involved in the game and not responsible for the decision. You can go and have a cup of tea and look at it from a different point of view.

The book has never been written which is to be accepted without any allowance.

Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.

The use of literature is to afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our present life, a purchase by which we may move it....we see literature best from the midst of wild nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The field cannot be well seen from within the field.

I don't want to insert myself into the story. I just want to give a useful analysis of it to help people come to their own conclusions.

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

You should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it. We call that 'Diax's Rake.

How can we judge fairly of the characters and merits of men, of the wisdom or folly of actions, unless we have . . . an accurate knowledge of all particulars, so that we may live as it were in the times, and among the persons, of whom we read, see with their eyes, and reason and decide on their premises?

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

Deconstruction: peering suspiciously at the text, I wait for it to make a slip and betray itself.

I think the purpose of deconstruction is to take something apart and see how it works. If you're not going to put it back together again and watch it go, what's the point?

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

One of the reasons we do history, in fact, is because it acts as a brake, a control, on our otherwise unbridled enthusiasm for our own ideas.

A picture is never anything but its own plural description.