Top 54 Ernest Renan Quotes
#1. All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles.
Ernest Renan
#2. 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.
Ernest Renan
#3. As soon as sacrifice becomes a duty and necessity to mankind. I see no limit to the horizon which opens before him.
Ernest Renan
#4. The epic disappeared along with the age of personal heroism; there can be no epic with artillery.
Ernest Renan
#5. The prayer of the agnostic: "O God, if there is a God, save my soul if I have a soul."
Ernest Renan
#6. Blessed are the blind, for they know not enough to ask why.
Ernest Renan
#7. Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation.
Ernest Renan
#8. 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.
Ernest Renan
#9. The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.
Ernest Renan
#10. Jesus was the greatest religious genius that ever lived.
Ernest Renan
#11. The man who obeys is nearly always better than the man who commands.
Ernest Renan
#12. The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.
Ernest Renan
#13. Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.
Ernest Renan
#14. Woe to him who becomes useless to human progress!
Ernest Renan
#15. A grain of sand leads to the fall of a mountain when the moment has come for the mountain to fall.
Ernest Renan
#16. 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.
Ernest Renan
#17. Communism is in conflict with human nature.
Ernest Renan
#18. The virtue of man is, in a word, the great proof of God.
Ernest Renan
#20. Relax yourself from one job by doing a different one.
Ernest Renan
#21. The oblivion, and I'll say even the historical error, are a key factor in the creation of a nation, to the extent that the progress of historical studies is often a danger to nationality.
Ernest Renan
#22. I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.
Ernest Renan
#23. Man makes holy what he believes as he makes beautiful what he loves.
Ernest Renan
#24. The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
Ernest Renan
#25. Islam has been liberal when it has been weak and violent when it has been strong.
Ernest Renan
#26. 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.
Ernest Renan
#27. 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.
Ernest Renan
#28. Fanatics fear liberty more than they fear persecution.
Ernest Renan
#29. 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.
Ernest Renan
#30. 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
Ernest Renan
#31. No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifice; no one ever escapes without enduring strain from the struggle of life.
Ernest Renan
#32. The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.
Ernest Renan
#33. 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.
Ernest Renan
#34. 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.
Ernest Renan
#35. Jealousy is the foundation of equality, but not of liberty ; putting man constantly on his guard against the encroachments of his neighbors. It prevents affability between different classes. There is no society without affection, without tradition, without respect, without mutual amenity.
Ernest Renan
#36. The ignorance of French society gives one a rough sense of the infinite.
Ernest Renan
#37. 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.
Ernest Renan
#38. God, if there is a God, take my soul, if I have a soul.
Ernest Renan
#39. Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.
Ernest Renan
#40. 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.
Ernest Renan
#41. It is through Christianity that Judaism has really conquered the world. Christianity is the masterpiece of Judaism ...
Ernest Renan
#42. 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 .
Ernest Renan
#43. To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes.
Ernest Renan
#44. Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.
Ernest Renan
#45. Work is the best thing to make us love life.
Ernest Renan
#46. 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.
Ernest Renan
#47. 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.
Ernest Renan
#48. When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.
Ernest Renan
#50. What is human life? Is it not a maimed happiness - care and weariness, weariness and care, with the baseless expectation...of a brighter tomorrow?
Ernest Renan
#51. It is good for everyone to know how to forget.
Ernest Renan
#52. O Lord, if there is a Lord, save my soul, if I have a soul...
Ernest Renan
#53. Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.
Ernest Renan
#54. All history is incomprehensible without Christ.
Ernest Renan
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