Renan Quotes & Sayings

The Historian and the Man of Science alike may be said to traffic with the dead. Cuvier has imparted flesh and motion and appetites to the defunct Megatherium, whilst the living ears of M.M. Michelet and Renan, of Mr. Carlyle and the Brothers Grimm, have heard the bloodless cries of the vanished and given them voices. I myself, with the aid of the imagination, have worked a little in that line, have ventriloquised, have lent my voice to, and mixt my life with, those past voices and lives whose resuscitation in our own lives as warnings, as examples, as the life of the past persisting in us, is the business of every thinking man and woman. — A.S. Byatt

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

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

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. — Ernest Renan

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

A true champion is not only formed in victory. To be defeated makes you learn. — Renan Barao

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. — 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

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

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. — Ernest Renan

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

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

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. — Ernest Renan

Fanatics fear liberty more than they fear persecution. — Ernest Renan

The atheist is a religious person. He believes in atheism as though it were a new religion. According to Renan, "The day after that on which the world should no longer believe in God, atheists would be the wretchedest of all men." — Eric Hoffer

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. — Ernest Renan

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

Communism is in conflict with human nature. — 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

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

The oblivion, and I'll say even the historical error, are a key factor in the creation of a nation, to the extent that the progress of historical studies is often a danger to nationality. — Ernest Renan

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

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

Woe to him who becomes useless to human progress! — Ernest Renan

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

When you are some-'one', why would you wish to be some-'thing'? — Gustave Flaubert

What is human life? Is it not a maimed happiness - care and weariness, weariness and care, with the baseless expectation...of a brighter tomorrow? — 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

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. — Ernest Renan

Islam has been liberal when it has been weak and violent when it has been strong. — Ernest Renan

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

Islam, however inadequate, was the only source of ethics and stimulus for political mobilization. And al-Afghani also presciently saw that a totally secular society- the dream of nineteenth-century rationalism- was doomed to remain a fantasy in the West as well as in the Muslim world. As he concluded in his response to Renan:
The masses do not like reason, the teachings of which are understood only by a few select minds. Science, however fine it may be, cannot completely satisfy humanity's thirst for the ideal, or the desire to soar in dark and distant regions that philosophers and scholars can neither see nor explore. — Pankaj Mishra

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

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

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

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

Jesus was the greatest religious genius that ever lived. — Ernest Renan

It is good for everyone to know how to forget. — Ernest Renan

Renan, Bennet and Ingersol are not haters of truth. Rather may it be said, they hate counterfeits and are indignant at the assumptions of apostate Christendom. In their impetuosity they have rushed into the other extreme, and demand for science more than she can rightly claim. — Anonymous

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

Relax yourself from one job by doing a different one. — Ernest Renan

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. — Ernest Renan

All history is incomprehensible without Christ. — Ernest Renan

You can't change your attitude because you're the champion. I've always kept my feet on the ground and never wanted to change. — Renan Barao

the famed French theorist Ernest Renan, who years ago defined the nation as "a group of people united in a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors. — Reza Aslan

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 — Ernest Renan

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

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

Man makes holy what he believes as he makes beautiful what he loves. — Ernest Renan

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

The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world. — Oscar Wilde

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. — Ernest Renan

The contradictions in Renan , his feminine sensibility, coquetry, unavowed egotism, and sudden emotional outbursts, all indicate a soul deliberately using distraction as a means of evasion. The perpetual equivocation bears witness to God in the same way as the twisting and turning of a hunted animal indicates the presence of an unseen hunter. — Georges Bernanos

Defeat is only a defeat when we don't learn anything. — Renan Barao

Since the Greeks the predominant attitude of thinkers towards intellectual activity was to glorify it insofar as (like aesthetic activity) it finds its satisfaction in itself, apart from any attention to the advantages it may procure. Most thinkers would have agreed with ... Renan's verdict that the man who loves science for its fruits commits the worst of blasphemies against that divinity ... The modern clercs have violently torn up this charter. They proclaim the intellectual functions are only respectable to the extent that they are bound up with the pursuit of concrete advantage. — Julien Benda

It is evident, indeed, that such a doctrine, taken by itself in a literal manner, had no future. The world, in continuing to exist, caused it to crumble. One generation of man at the most was the limit of its endurance. The faith of the first Christian generation is intelligible, but the faith of the second generation is no longer so. After the death of John, or of the last survivor, whoever he might be, of the group which had seen the master, the word of Jesus was convicted of falsehood. — Ernest Renan

Work is the best thing to make us love life. — Ernest Renan

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

Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation. — Ernest Renan

In his funeral oration the spokesman of the most artistic and critical of European nations, Ernest Renan, hailed him as one of the greatest writers of our times: 'The Master, whose exquisite works have charmed our century, stands more than any other man as the incarnation of a whole race,' because 'a whole world lived in him and spoke through his mouth.' Not the Russian world only, we may add, but the whole Slavonic world, to which it was 'an honour to have been expressed by so great a Master. — Ivan Turgenev

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

Man makes holy what he believes. — Ernest Renan

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

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

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

I'm a natural born sniper. — Renan Barao

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. — Ernest Renan

Jealousy is the foundation of equality, but not of liberty ; putting man constantly on his guard against the encroachments of his neighbors. It prevents affability between different classes. There is no society without affection, without tradition, without respect, without mutual amenity. — Ernest Renan

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

History is as much an art as a science. — Ernest Renan

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