Quotes from Ernest Renan

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

All history is incomprehensible without Christ.

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

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.

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

Communism is in conflict with human nature.

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.

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?

Man makes holy what he believes.

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.

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

All history is incomprehensible without Christ.

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.

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

To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes.

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.

The man who obeys is nearly always better than the man who commands.

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.

Work is the best thing to make us love life.

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

Relax yourself from one job by doing a different one.

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

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