Top 50 Ernest Renan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.”

— Ernest Renan

3. “The prayer of the agnostic: “O God, if there is a God, save my soul if I have a soul.””

— Ernest Renan

4. “It is through Christianity that Judaism has really conquered the world. Christianity is the masterpiece of Judaism...”

— Ernest Renan

5. “Muslims are the first victims of Islam. To liberate a Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him!”

— Ernest Renan

6. “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

7. “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

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

— Ernest Renan

9. “All history is incomprehensible without Christ.”

— Ernest Renan

10. “Relax yourself from one job by doing a different one.”

— Ernest Renan

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

— Ernest Renan

12. “Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.”

— Ernest Renan

13. “Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation.”

— Ernest Renan

14. “History is as much an art as a science.”

— Ernest Renan

15. “A nation is a body of people who have done great things together.”

— Ernest Renan

16. “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

17. “Man makes holy what he believes as he makes beautiful what he loves.”

— Ernest Renan

18. “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

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

— Ernest Renan

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

— Ernest Renan

21. “Communism is in conflict with human nature.”

— Ernest Renan

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

— Ernest Renan

23. “Work is the best thing to make us love life.”

— Ernest Renan

24. “The ignorance of French society gives one a rough sense of the infinite.”

— Ernest Renan

25. “I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.”

— Ernest Renan

26. “Jesus was the greatest religious genius that ever lived.”

— Ernest Renan

27. “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

28. “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

29. “Fanatics fear liberty more than they fear persecution.”

— Ernest Renan

30. “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.”

— Ernest Renan

31. “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

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

— Ernest Renan

33. “No idea can succeed except at the expense of sacrifice; no one ever escapes without enduring strain from the struggle of life.”

— Ernest Renan

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

— Ernest Renan

35. “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

36. “The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.”

— Ernest Renan

37. “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

38. “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

39. “To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes.”

— Ernest Renan

40. “The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.”

— Ernest Renan

41. “Islam has been liberal when it has been weak and violent when it has been strong.”

— Ernest Renan

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

— Ernest Renan

43. “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

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

— Ernest Renan

45. “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

46. “It is good for everyone to know how to forget.”

— Ernest Renan

47. “Woe to him who becomes useless to human progress!”

— Ernest Renan

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

— Ernest Renan

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

— Ernest Renan

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

— Ernest Renan