Ernest Renan Quotes - Page 2

All history is incomprehensible without Christ.

Work is the best thing to make us love life.

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

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 .

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.

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.

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

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.

The epic disappeared along with the age of personal heroism; there can be no epic with artillery.

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.

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

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

Relax yourself from one job by doing a different one.

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

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

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.

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.

The virtue of man is, in a word, the great proof of God.

Jesus was the greatest religious genius that ever lived.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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