Ernest Renan Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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Blessed are the blind, for they know not enough to ask why.
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The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.
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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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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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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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Communism is in conflict with human nature.
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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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Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.
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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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When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.
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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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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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The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.
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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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All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles.
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History is as much an art as a science.
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The virtue of man is, in a word, the great proof of God.
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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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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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Relax yourself from one job by doing a different one.