Ernest Renan

Sourced

• 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.
  • Letter to his elder sister Henriette (1841)

• 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.
  • Orlando, in Caliban, act 2, sc. 1 (1878)

• 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.
  • Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 3. L’Avenir de la Science (1890)

Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus) (1863)

• 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.
  • Ch. 5

• 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.
  • Ch. 5

• 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.
  • Ch. 5

• 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?
  • Ch. 17

Ernest Renan: a Critical Biography (1964)

• I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.
  • The Republic

• 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.
  • Saint Sulpice and the Hidden God

Unsourced

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

• 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.

• Communism is in conflict with human nature.

• 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?

• Man makes holy what he believes.

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

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

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

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

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