Ernest Renan Quotes
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Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.
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When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.
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The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.
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Good humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us.
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Blessed are the blind, for they know not enough to ask why.
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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.
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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.
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The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.
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Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.
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It is through Christianity that Judaism has really conquered the world. Christianity is the masterpiece of Judaism.
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Relax yourself from one job by doing a different one.
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Communism is in conflict with human nature.
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Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.
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Jesus was the greatest religious genius that ever lived.
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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.
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As soon as sacrifice becomes a duty and necessity to mankind. I see no limit to the horizon which opens before him.
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All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles.
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The virtue of man is, in a word, the great proof of God.
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To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to will to do the like again, — such are the essential conditions for the making of a people.
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The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.
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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.
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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.
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History is as much an art as a science.
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A grain of sand leads to the fall of a mountain when the moment has come for the mountain to fall.