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Ernest Renan (1823 – 1892)


French philosopher, playwright, and writer.
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Ernest Renan
The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.
Renan quotes
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.
Renan
Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.




Renan Ernest 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.
Renan Ernest
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 quotes
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
Man makes holy what he believes.
Renan Ernest quotes
When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.
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.
Renan Ernest
All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles.
Ernest Renan
The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.




Ernest Renan quotes
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
Communism is in conflict with human nature.
Renan quotes
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.
Renan Ernest
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.
Renan Ernest quotes
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
The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.
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