Paul Ricoeur Quotes

I collect axioms, paradoxes, maxims, teaching stories, proverbs, and aphorisms of all sorts, because I love to see complex ideas distilled into a few words.

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation's proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

Two eyes see more than one.

A proverb is one man’s wit and all men’s wisdom.

Elders are the books of the young.

A wise man hears one word and understands two.

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are preserved by quotations.

The words of Jesus, as distinguishable from the matter in which they are embedded as diamonds in dunghills. A more precious morsel of ethics was never seen.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced--even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.

I love fairy tales because I think that behind fairy tales, there is always a meaning.

I'm no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it's got everything: it's a book of poetry, it's a book of principle, it's a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.

Storytelling is a universal: every culture does it. There's a reason our religious books aren't simply a list of shall-and-shall-nots. Morals and teachings are contained in stories, which are studied, dissected, and passed down; we remember stories in a way we don't remember lists of facts.

I think the astute viewer can recognise I am the proper bloke, because I have a toolbox and can put things back together, and I can quote W. B. Yeats and Alfred Lord Tennyson.

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

To this generation I would say: Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty.

poetry is the breath and finer spirit of knowledge

The hope of the world is that wisdom can arrest conflict between brothers. I believe that war is the deadly harvest of arrogant and unreasoning minds. And I find grounds for this belief in the wisdom literature of Proverbs. It says in effect this: Panic strikes like a storm and calamity comes like a whirlwind to those who hate knowledge and ignore their God.

Wisdom married to immortal verse.

Without poetry our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

There are but few proverbial sayings that are not true, for they are all drawn from experience itself, which is the mother of all sciences.

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

Perhaps you don't desire poetry as much as you would like to have my torchy knowledge of your possible futures, but I dare say poetry will do you far more good. For knowing the future only makes you timid and complacent by turns, while poetry can shape you into the kind of souls who can face any future with boldness and wisdom and nobility, so that you need not know the future at all, so that any future will be an opportunity for greatness, if you have greatness in you.

This is the nature of genius, to be able to grasp the knowable even when no one else recognizes that it is present.

Apothegms form a short cut to much knowledge.