Paul Ricoeur Quotes

Language operates between literal and metaphorical signification.

A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motor show - full of potential but temporarily inactive.

Metaphor is embodied in language.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

I talk in subjects and verbs, and sort of wind around in concentric circles until I get far enough away from the beginning so that I can call it the end, and it ends.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

I do think my lyrics have gotten... not necessarily more poetic, but more open to interpretation; they're less literal.

It's not in my nature to be too literal.

I don't ever get too literal.

For some people, 'ten feet tall' is just a metaphor. For me, it's more than twice my height!

All words, in every language, are metaphors.

A theology whose god is a metaphor is wasting its time.

Look who's calling the cauldron black." "Kettle. It’s a kettle. Get your metaphors right." "That wasn’t a metaphor. It was a, you know..." He stared off into space, blinking. "One of those things that’s symbolic of another thing. But isn’t the same thing. Just like it." "You mean a metaphor?" "No! It’s like a story...like...a proverb! That’s it." "I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a proverb. Maybe it was an analogy." "I don’t think so.

The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

You live for pretentious metaphors.

Everything in life is a metaphor.

life is like a jigsaw puzzle, you have to see the whole picture, then put it together piece by piece!

If the grape is made of wine, then perhaps we are the words that tell who we are

You know, when most girls say they want a big rock, they don't mean, you know, literally a big rock. -Clary Fray to Jace Wayland

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.

I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.

A powerful enough metaphor grows its own truth.