Ernest Renan Quotes

A nation has a soul, a spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession of a rich legacy of memories; the other is the desire to live together and to value the common heritage.

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.

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

Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation.

A nation is a body of people who have done great things together.

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

The prayer of the agnostic: "O God, if there is a God, save my soul if I have a soul."

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

To act well in this world, one must sacrifice all personal desires. The people who become missionaries of religious thought have no other Fatherland than this thought. Man is not on Earth merely to be happy, nor even simply to be honest. He is here to realize great things for humanity, to attain nobility, and to surmount the vulgarity of nearly every individual.

Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.

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

The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.

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

True Christianity, which will last forever, comes from the gospel words of Christ not from the epistles of Paul. The writings of Paul have been a danger and a hidden rock, the causes of the principal defects of Christian theology.

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.

Muslims are the first victims of Islam. To liberate a Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him!

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.

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.

Human cruelty took the form of a pact with the deity. A solemn oath was made to kill everything, in which people forbade themselves any display of reason or compassion. A city or a land was devoted to destruction and it was believed an insult to God if one did not observe the abominable oath.

Communism is in conflict with human nature.

A grain of sand leads to the fall of a mountain when the moment has come for the mountain to fall.

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

The ignorance of French society gives one a rough sense of the infinite.

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.

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