Ernest Renan Quotations

Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.

To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed.

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.

All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles.

Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.

When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.

In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact.

Blessed are the blind, for they know not enough to ask why.

He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign.

God, if there is a God, take my soul, if I have a soul.

No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifice; no one ever escapes without enduring strain from the struggle of life.

As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost.

The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.

I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.

Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.

You may take great comfort from the fact that suffering inwardly for the sake of truth proves abundantly that one loves it and marks one out as being of the elect.

The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.

O Lord - if there is a Lord; save my soul - if I have a soul

The only way of salvation for the world is by returning to thy allegiance.... Firm in my faith, I shall have force to withstand my evil counsellors, my skepticism, which leads me to doubt of the people, my restless spirit which, after truth has been brought to light, impels to go on searching for it...

Jesus was the greatest religious genius that ever lived.

As soon as sacrifice becomes a duty and necessity to mankind. I see no limit to the horizon which opens before him.

History is as much an art as a science.

His glory Jesus Christ does not consist in beingplaced without the confines of history; a more real worship is paid to him, by showing that the whole of history is incomprehensible without him.

All history is incomprehensible without Christ.

Never has any one been less a priest than Jesus, never a greater enemy of forms, which stifle religion under the pretext of protecting it. By this we are all his disciples and his successors; by this he has laid the eternal foundation-stone of true religion; and if religion is essential to humanity, he has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded him.

The epic disappeared along with the age of personal heroism; there can be no epic with artillery.

The man who obeys is nearly always better than the man who commands.

The ignorance of French society gives one a rough sense of the infinite.

Every rebel is, with us, more or less a soldier who has missed his vocation, a being made for a heroic life ... The European race is a race of masters and soldiers. If you reduce this noble race to the work in a slave's prison like Negroes or Chinamen, it will rebel.

A grain of sand leads to the fall of a mountain when the moment has come for the mountain to fall.

A nation is a body of people who have done great things together.

Sometimes they reasoned thus: "The Messiah ought to do such a thing, now Jesus is the Messiah, therefore Jesus has done such a thing." At other times, by an inverse process, it was said: "Such a thing has happened to Jesus; now Jesus is the Messiah; therefore such a thing was to happen to the Messiah."

It is evident, indeed, that such a doctrine, taken by itself in a literal manner, had no future. The world, in continuing to exist, caused it to crumble. One generation of man at the most was the limit of its endurance. The faith of the first Christian generation is intelligible, but the faith of the second generation is no longer so. After the death of John, or of the last survivor, whoever he might be, of the group which had seen the master, the word of Jesus was convicted of falsehood.

Human cruelty took the form of a pact with the deity. A solemn oath was made to kill everything, in which people forbade themselves any display of reason or compassion. A city or a land was devoted to destruction and it was believed an insult to God if one did not observe the abominable oath.

Jesus , in some respects, was an anarchist, for he had no idea of civil government . That government seems to him purely and simply an abuse. A great social revolution, in which rank will be overturned, in which all authority in this world will be humiliated, was his dream .

Work is the best thing to make us love life.

Relax yourself from one job by doing a different one.

The virtue of man is, in a word, the great proof of God.

Communism is in conflict with human nature.

None of the miracles with which ancient histories are filled, occurred under scientific conditions. Observation never once contradicted, teaches us that miracles occur only in periods and countries in which they are believed in and before persons disposed to believe in them.

To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes.

The prayer of the agnostic: "O God, if there is a God, save my soul if I have a soul."

The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.

Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.

To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together; to wish to do greater; these are the essential conditions which make up a people

Morality has been conceived up to the present in a very narrow spirit, as obedience to a law, as inner struggle between opposite laws. As for me, I declare that when I do good I obey no one, I fight no battle and win no victory. The cultivated person has only to follow the delicious incline of his or her inner impulses. Be beautiful and then do at each moment whatever your heart may inspire you to do. This is the whole of morality.

True Christianity, which will last forever, comes from the gospel words of Christ not from the epistles of Paul. The writings of Paul have been a danger and a hidden rock, the causes of the principal defects of Christian theology.

It is through Christianity that Judaism has really conquered the world. Christianity is the masterpiece of Judaism...

Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation.

Man makes holy what he believes as he makes beautiful what he loves.

Muslims are the first victims of Islam. To liberate a Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him!

A nation has a soul, a spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession of a rich legacy of memories; the other is the desire to live together and to value the common heritage.

To act well in this world, one must sacrifice all personal desires. The people who become missionaries of religious thought have no other Fatherland than this thought. Man is not on Earth merely to be happy, nor even simply to be honest. He is here to realize great things for humanity, to attain nobility, and to surmount the vulgarity of nearly every individual.

Muslims are the first victims of Islam. Many times I have observed in my travels in the Orient that fanaticism comes from a small number of dangerous men who maintain the others in the practice of religion by terror. To liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service one can render him.