Ernest Renan Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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
I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.

Ernest Renan
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?

Ernest Renan
The only way of salvation for the world is by returning to thy allegiance.... Firm in my faith, I shall have force to withstand my evil counsellors, my skepticism, which leads me to doubt of the people, my restless spirit which, after truth has been brought to light, impels to go on searching for it...

Ernest Renan
It is through Christianity that Judaism has really conquered the world. Christianity is the masterpiece of Judaism...

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

Ernest Renan
A little true science is better than a great deal of bad science. One is less liable to error by confessing one's ignorance than by fancying that one knows a great many things one does not.

Ernest Renan
Sometimes they reasoned thus: "The Messiah ought to do such a thing, now Jesus is the Messiah, therefore Jesus has done such a thing." At other times, by an inverse process, it was said: "Such a thing has happened to Jesus; now Jesus is the Messiah; therefore such a thing was to happen to the Messiah."

Ernest Renan
Science has no enemies save those who consider truth as useless and making no difference, and those who granting to truth its priceless value profess to get at it by other roads than those of criticism and rational investigation.

Ernest Renan
The lofty serenity of science becomes possible only on the condition of impartial criticism, which without regard for the beliefs of a certain portion of humanity, handles its imperturbable instrument with the inflexibility of the geometrician, without anger and without pity. The critic never insults.

Ernest Renan
Science and science alone is capable of restoring to humanity that without which it cannot live; a creed and a law.

Ernest Renan
Science is a religion, science alone will henceforth make the creeds, science alone can solve for men the eternal problems, the solutions of which his nature imperatively demands.

Ernest Renan
Socrates founded philosophy, and Aristotle science. There was philosophy before Socrates, and science before Aristotle; and since Socrates and since Aristotle, philosophy and science have made immense progress: but all has all been built upon the foundations they laid.

Ernest Renan
O Lord, if there is a Lord, save my soul, if I have a soul.

Ernest Renan
To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

Ernest Renan
Before French culture, German culture, Italian culture, there is human culture.

Ernest Renan
Immortality is to labor at an eternal task.

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

Ernest Renan
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.

Ernest Renan
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—these are the essential conditions for the making of a people.

Ernest Renan
Fanatics fear liberty more than they fear persecution.

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

Ernest Renan
Nothing great is achieved without chimeras.

Ernest Renan
The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.

Ernest Renan
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
The whole of history is incomprehensible without him [Jesus].

Ernest Renan
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