Ernest Renan
Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.Collection: Sad
God, if there is a God, take my soul, if I have a soul.Collection: God
The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.Collection: Education
The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.Collection: Freedom
Man is not on this earth merely to be happy, or even to be simply honest. He is there to realize great things for humanity, to attain nobility and to surmount the vulgarity of almost everybody.
Man makes holy what he believes.
Blessed are the blind, for they know not enough to ask why.
Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.
All history is incomprehensible without Christ.
Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.
No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifice; no one ever escapes without enduring strain from the struggle of life.
Communism is in conflict with human nature.
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.
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.
When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.
The greatest men of a nation are those it puts to death.
I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.
All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles.
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.
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.
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.
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Spiritual
Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation.Collection: Errors
A nation is a body of people who have done great things together.Collection: People
Man makes holy what he believes as he makes beautiful what he loves.Collection: Beauty
The prayer of the agnostic: "O God, if there is a God, save my soul if I have a soul."Collection: Prayer
Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.Collection: History
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.Collection: Religious
It is through Christianity that Judaism has really conquered the world. Christianity is the masterpiece of Judaism.Collection: World
The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.Collection: Lying
To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Christian
Muslims are the first victims of Islam. To liberate a Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him!Collection: Islam
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.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Compassion
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.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Past
The ignorance of French society gives one a rough sense of the infinite.Collection: Travel
A grain of sand leads to the fall of a mountain when the moment has come for the mountain to fall.Collection: Fall
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 .Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Christian
Work is the best thing to make us love life.Collection: Work
The man who obeys is nearly always better than the man who commands.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Race
The epic disappeared along with the age of personal heroism; there can be no epic with artillery.Collection: Epic
Relax yourself from one job by doing a different one.Collection: Jobs
As soon as sacrifice becomes a duty and necessity to mankind. I see no limit to the horizon which opens before him.Collection: Sacrifice
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.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Beautiful