Ernest Renan Quotes (25 Quotes)

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

All history is incomprehensible without Christ.

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.

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.

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

Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven. Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle to which he might otherwise have been unequal

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

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.

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

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

Man makes holy what he believes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 religio

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

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

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.

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.

Communism is in conflict with human nature.