Ernest Renan Quotes
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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 .
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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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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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It is through Christianity that Judaism has really conquered the world. Christianity is the masterpiece of Judaism.
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Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.
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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.
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A nation is a body of people who have done great things together.
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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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Communism is in conflict with human nature.
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The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.
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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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When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.
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Blessed are the blind, for they know not enough to ask why.
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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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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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The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.
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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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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.
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Work is the best thing to make us love life.
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The virtue of man is, in a word, the great proof of God.
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Relax yourself from one job by doing a different one.
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Jesus was the greatest religious genius that ever lived.
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History is as much an art as a science.
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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.